Hi everyone,
for quite some time we have had a discussion about the pros and cons of a
separate wikipedia in Low Saxon for the "Dutch" spelling.
I would like to summarize the main points.
1) Low Saxon on both sides of the Dutch-German border differs
1.1) in the spelling up to a point of being unrecognizable for the average
user.
1.2) in the vocabulary, where Low Saxon (due to its decline over the
centuries) does not have words of its own, or where these original words were
forgotten. In such cases there has been a steady import of German words (in
the eastern part) and of Dutch words (in the western part). This too leads to
words that make the text "from the other side" difficult to understand.
2) We have had a discussion in
nds.wikipedia.org about this and came to the
conclusion that these two variants of Low Saxon are too different to be
mixed. Otherwise there would be a continous quarrel over article titles and
article content. Both sides (the "eastern fraction" and the "western
fraction") agreed about this and came up with the idea to have two different
wikipedias, just like Norwegian and Romanian wikipedias come in two different
versions for two different language forms.
3) We proposed this in
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Dutch-Low_Saxon
where we have gathered the neccessary amount of supporters. This has caused a
wild discussions about language variants, language competence of the people
involved etc. Apart from one lonly cruisader (node_ue) there has been a lot
of support and the tally is 9 ayes against 1 nay (guess from whom).
4) In the meantime a main page for the proposed
nds-nl.wikipedia.org was
written. It can be found in
http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Servien/Heufdbladsyde and besides, it
shows that the two variants of Low Saxon (see
nds.wikipedia.org for the
"eastern" version) are quite a lot apart.
In order to put an end to the discussion and in order to allow everyone to
calm down and get back to work, I would therefore like to request the
immediate creation of
nds-ln.wikipedia.org and I propose to make Servien (who
has put a lot of effort into this) a temporary Administrator of nds-nl to be
able to
1) install the basic pages and
2) organize a vote about Adminship.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann