[Foundation-l] Voluntary is Wiki - Re: A dangerous precedent

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Dec 28, 2007 8:19 AM, hillgentleman
<hillgentleman.wikiversity at gmail.com> wrote:
> Andrew Whitworth,
>
>   Sorry for this late reply;  I have just noticed the existence of this thread.
>
>  "...is not nearly so important as ..."
>   It is not you to tell others in which language a wikimedian should contribute.
> Everybody decides for herself.   Wiki is made by volunteers.
>
> H.

Thanks for the reply. My point was not to tell which languages a
person should contribute in, i don't care which communications medium
people use. I was talking instead about "language preservation", the
act of using a large written record such as Wikipedia to preserve a
dieing language. Think of it in terms of the rosetta stone, where a
preserved written text is able to help us translate a dead language
many years later. Given enough server space for one, I would prefer to
preserve a natural language rather then a conlang. Of course, this
preference ignores the fact that it's (apparently) not the WMF's goal
to preserve languages whatsoever. The goal of Wikipedia, instead, is
to preserve and distribute knowledge, and that goal is not helped by
writing a small language wikipedia (conlang or natural language) for
which there are no natural-born speakers and a trivially small
secondary speaking population. I personally would rather people not
contribute, then to have people contribute in a way that doesnt help
our goals. Again, this is just a personal preference.

--Andrew Whitworth