[Wikipedia-l] Re: Q1 2005 Fund Drive over

[Mark Williamson]

Are any of your students Ossetic speakers, or for that matter speakers
of other Russian Federation languages?

Even if you don't know if any of them speak it, it would be a very
nice thing to mention.

When Wikipedia is spread from these students to their friends, it
would be nice if in addition to "Russian free encyclopedia which
anybody can edit", they will go to a Chuvash friend and say "Free
encyclopedia which anybody can edit, with even a version in Chuvash
waiting to be built".

I think that in this respect, if people were to mention this more such
wikipedias would have more contributors.

When Danny or Jimbo or Eloquence or Angela or whomever presents the
concept at a conference, as far as I know they either 1) don't mention
languages except in passing, 2) mention that it's multilingual and
that there are, for example, German and Japanese versions or 3)
mention the fact that it is available in the national language.

If a presentation is being made in Spain, I think it is important to
say "Not only is it available in Castillian, but there are also
Wikipedias in Asturian, Aragonese, Galician, Catalan, and Basque".

Some people may not think it is notable, but to give a local example
drives home that Wikipedia is very diverse. If you are presenting in
China, please don't forget to mention that we have places for people
to build Wikipedias in Yi, Zhuang, Tibetan, Uyghur, and many other
languages.

If you are in Indonesia, please don't forget to mention that there
are, in addition to the Indonesian Wikipedia (which is for whatever
strange reason separate from the Malay Wikipedia), Sundanese and
Javanese Wikipedias, and that Balinese, Timorese, Acehnese, or any
other Indonesian languages will be welcomed on Wikipedia.

If you are in India please don't forget to mention that we have a
Wikipedia for every single one of the languages mentioned in India's
constitution - not just Hindi, but Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali,
Kashmiri, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Oriya.

The population that speaks these languages is not especially relevant.
Even in Hawai'i please mention that we have a Hawai'ian Wikipedia (if
I were in Hawai'i for a conference to speak about Wikipedia, I would
also meet with Hawai'ian language activists to discuss Wikipedia with
them, but obviously and understandably such issues are not as
important when your focus is not linguistic diversity), in Phoenix
mention that we have a Navajo Wikipedia, in Calgary mention that we
have Cree and Inuktitut Wikipedias, in Denmark mention our Faroese and
Greenlandic Wikipedias.

Mark

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 10:43:54 +0300, V. Ivanov <amikeco at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've shawn the Wikipedia project to my students yesterday (its Russian
> part mostly). And one of the students asked me: "But how do they
> expect to collect the huge money? Who will pay 75000?!" :) Now at the
> next lesson I can show him the result: one pessimist off. :)
> 
> Congratulations!
> 
> Sl.
> 
> On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 05:33:16 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I am properly amazed by the speed we reached our goal....10 days while
> > we had planned 3 weeks ! It is really impressing. The good point is also
> > that we can remove the fundraising banner so quickly ...
> 
> --
> Esperu cxiam!
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