[Foundation-l] What to do with moribund languages?

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> The notion of redundancy of articles in minority languages coming from you
> Milos is painful. There is typically an article of a majority language that
> arguably covers the subject best. All other articles are redundant because
> you can use something like Google translate to share the benefit of the
> best. While the article in Lower Sorbian may not be as good as the German or
> Polish article, it is still part of the maze of articles that makes up this
> encyclopaedic effort. Given that all projects have their room to grow, we
> should let them and be happy when they do.
>
> It is not for the language committee to opine about the relative value of a
> language. When it is a living language, it is eligible and when the other
> requirements are met, it is for the people who support their project, their
> language to make it as good as they can.

Lower Sorbian is a good example for my point because I don't think
that there is a native speaker of Lower Sorbian who is not a native
speaker of German. So, I chose that for the example. There are, of
course, other examples where the article about the Earth is necessary.
For example, [almost] every Macedonian knows Serbian as their second
language (a lot of them know Bulgarian, too). There is a significant
difference between the native and the second language. [Almost] all
Ukrainians know Russian as their native language. But, there are ~50M
of Ukrainians, a lot of Ukrainian cultural institutions and so on; and
they are in the position to work on articles in their language about
quantum mechanics and similar.

But, Lower Sorbian is in the completely different position. Every
article in Lower Sorbian has cultural, not educational purpose.
Article in Lower Sorbian about the Earth means that there is an
article about the Earth in that language, it doesn't mean that someone
will use it as a source of information.

The point is that in such cases it is much more clever to work
systematically on the cultural issues than build random articles on
one encyclopedia. In such cases, having a Wiktionary (or using
OmegaWiki for that purpose, whatever) is more important than having a
Wikipedia, too.

If we want to help to such languages, we need to share our experiences
with native speakers. Having an encyclopedia is an expensive luxury.
>From the point of not so small language area, well educated population
and a rich society in comparison with the most of the world, I may say
that a good ordinary encyclopedia is beyond our cultural strength. A
culture of the similar size has to have very rich and very well
educated society to build ordinary encyclopedias (for example,
Netherlands and Sweden).

Wikipedia makes building encyclopedia much easier. So, it is possible
to have a good online encyclopedia in Serbian. But, everything has
limits. Writing articles which no one would read to search
informations is a task without a lot of sense. It is better to try to
find good examples of language revival, like Welsh is, and try to
incorporate that into Wikimedia procedures, advices to for speakers of
endangered and moribund languages. Making connections with cultural
institutions which care about those languages may be one more good
path.

Actually, listing languages which don't have Wikimedia projects and
making a set of advices for each of them may be a very useful task.

Languages are far from being the same in the cultural sense. Because
of that we need different approaches for different languages.
Demanding MediaWiki localization for endangered or moribund languages
is not reasonable. Waiting undefined amount of time for discussion is
everything but not helping to them. So, we should think and articulate
some kind of solution. Note, also, that Wikimedia is in a very
specific position toward languages of the world: this is the
institution with the best knowledge of world languages. Even there are
just less than 300 languages, there is no other institution in the
world which is covering in depth this number of languages.

> The requirements for new projects have one aim and one aim only; to prevent
> more moribund *projects*. It it painful and stupid to have Wikipedias that
> never got a first article or are not in the language they are supposed to
> be. When a language is extinct or almost extinct, we might allow for a
> Wikisource in such a language. These are conservation projects. I have no
> opinion if Wikisource and MediaWiki provide the appropriate environment for
> such a project. I would not be surprised when other platforms do a better
> job for such languages.
>
> Incubator is in and of itself a temporary affair. This is its original
> purpose.

Incubator may be used for, let's say, building a Wiktionary. Also,
there is a sense to give to Incubator the new purpose: already
mentioned idea of Compendium: until one project is not
self-sustainable, it should exist at Incubator/Compendium. In a lot of
cases, this would be a long term option.