Langcom July 2015

langcom@lists.wikimedia.org

9 participants
4 discussions

Western Balochi
by Amir E. Aharoni 06 May '17

06 May '17

Hi, I received a few requests to check the status of Western Balochi incubator (bgn). The code bgn is legit, the translation of most-used messages is complete, and the activity in the incubator is reasonable. A lot of pages are written; many are just one or two lines long, but I don't think that I mind. Do we want to verify that it's the right language? -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Languages that are Arabic
by Gerard Meijssen 03 Aug '15

03 Aug '15

Hoi, At the time we accepted Egyptian, there was quite some ruckus because it was considered politically incorrect to accept this. Now that we have a request for "Algerian Arabic", it is prudent to ask what our position is. I am all in favour by the way.. Thanks, Gerard

5 5

Approval of South Azerbaijani Wikipedia
by Mjbmr 14 Jul '15

14 Jul '15

Hello, Please give us (the community) update about the approval. Thank you.

7 8

Azeri Latin vs. Arabic
by Amir E. Aharoni 05 Jul '15

05 Jul '15

Hi, The thing I feared has happened: A conflict erupted in the Azeri Wikipedia over the question of whether articles in Arabic script should be there, or only in Latin. A consensus was not reached, but an administrator decided to delete thousands of pages in the Arabic script nevertheless. This is a very severe action, and I suspect that that administrator's permissions should be suspended, but that's a matter for Meta stewards. I raise this question here, because a proper long-term solution for the problem is needed. As a reminder, the Azeri language is written in two scripts: Latin in the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Arabic in the Azerbaijan region in Northern Iran. As far as I know, both are actively used, and the users of each script cannot read the other one. Automatic conversion between the two scripts, as it is done for Kazakh and Serbian, is impossible, because the Latin orthography doesn't include capital letters and vowels. Until recently, the two scripts somehow lived together in the same wiki, despite the major technical problems with it, among them: * The users of the different alphabets cannot really have common conversations ("Village Pump"). * Only one article can be linked using Wikidata (to resolve this, major changes are needed in MediaWiki core and in Wikidata) * Be default the Latin script is used for the UI, which is not useful for anonymous readers who want to use the Arabic script. * The two scripts have different directionality, and this requires adding markup to show the pages correctly. But as I wrote above, now this long period of peace has ended, and unfortunately there is a major conflict. In the past we already discussed the possibility of creating a separate Wikipedia in the Arabic script: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_South_… IIRC, we decided not to support it, but I'd like to discuss this again. My impression is that there are good-faith contributors who want to write in the Arabic script, and now they are essentially expelled, and this is wrong. Other opinions are welcome. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Langcom July 2015