[Wikimediaau-l] adopting a language project

John Vandenberg jayvdb at gmail.com
Mon Nov 3 13:10:27 UTC 2008


I was looking at Wikimedia Indonesia earlier this evening...and
thought it would be nice to have a list of language projects that fall
under our care by default.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Indonesia/Activities

Sadly, LangCom assures me that strine will never be given an ISO code,
irrespective of how many words and phrases we make up.

We talked a while ago about Aboriginal languages; perhaps we can
continue along that path by trying to determine which Australian
Aboriginal languages are already represented by native speaking
Wikipedians  (do we have userboxen for that?)

However while we work up support for Aboriginal languages, perhaps we
can hone our skills in this area by adopting a language project of a
nearby country, or a language which has a large number of visitors,
immigrants or refugees.  Individually most of us would be unlikely to
get involved in these projects, as the learning curve is steep, but
perhaps by working as a team, a small group with general interest in
languages can learn a language together, falling back heavily on
English communication channels, like a dedicated mailing list or a
Wikiversity learning project, so as to not overburden the native
speakers on "their" wiki.

Here is a list of projects in the incubator:

http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The most obvious candidate that I can see in there is the Balinese
Wikipedia, which currently has 8 articles, for the 3.9 million native
speakers.

http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/ban
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balinese_language

Two others that look relevant are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%B6koot_language - Kenya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari_language - Afghanistan

If nothing else works, we could have a bit of fun with the Middle
English Wikipedia, which may not ever be approved by the language
committee due to the lack of utility for writing a modern
encyclopedia.  Still, It would be an interesting learning project for
many of us, and prepare us for the hard slog of building a project in
an Aboriginal language.

http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/enm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_language

--
John Vandenberg



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