Hi all,
I think Ingush Wikipedia can be approved, from the activity viewpoint. The
translation of the most-used messages is complete (<
http://tools.wmflabs.org/robin/?tool=codelookup&code=inh>) and there has
been a quite high activity since almost ten months now <
https://tools.wmflabs.org/meta/catanalysis/index.php?cat=0&title=Wp/inh&wik…
>.
Now we would of course need verificiation of the content. Searching the
archives, I found a mail from Amir from 10 November 2011. Back then, a
linguist had said the language in the test-wiki was not quite what would be
expected from literary Ingush. However, the current editors are all
different from the ones that were active five years ago.
Amir, could you check with that linguist or someone else from the Ingush
State University again about the quality of the content?
Best regards, MF-W
One issue: voting.
== Voting ==
This is also proposal, so read it and comment if you don't agree or
you want any addition.
1) No voting
1.1) According to the Closing projects policy [1], particular member
of the committee analyzes discussion and, if decides that the project
should be closed, sends the request to WMF Board.
1.2) Clear-cut situations for making a language eligible for Wikimedia
projects: the language has a valid ISO 639-3 code, there are no
significant issues in relation to the language itself, the population
of speakers is significant, request made by a native speaker. In this
case, any committee member can mark language / project eligible.
1.3) Approval without obvious formal requirements. No project will be
approved without them.
2) Simple majority (of those who expressed opinion)
2.1) Eligibility of a language with a valid ISO 639-3 code, but
without significant population of native speakers. (Note: this covers
ancient, constructed, reviving and languages with small number of
speakers.)
2.2) Eligibility of a language without a valid ISO 639-3 code, but
valid BCP 47 code. (Note: this covers Ecuadorian Quechua.)
2.3) Eligibility of a language with significant collision between
prescriptive and descriptive information. (Note: this covers
"macrolangauges".)
2.4) Project approval if not 1.3.
3) 2/3 majority (of those who expressed opinion)
3.1) Any change of the rules, including the committee's role in
possible changes of the Language proposal policy [2] and Closing
projects policy [1].
4) Consensus (of those who expressed opinion)
4.1) A new member of the Language committee should not be opposed by
any of the current committee member.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closing_projects_policy
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy
Hi,
See the forwarded email from Prof. John Myhill, who is trying to set up a
Dinka Wikipedia.
Dinka is a language spoken in South Sudan. We already discussed its
language code in the past:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/langcom/2017-February/000948.html
In that thread agreed that even though there are several relevant language
codes, it's acceptable to have one Wikipedia with the language code "din".
Like myself, Prof. Myhill happens to live in Israel, but we are otherwise
unrelated. (His work may have something to do with the fact that quite a
lot of refugees from South Sudan live in Israel, but this is just a guess.)
The translations at translatewiki.net look quite solid. The Most-used
group, which is required for creating the project, is complete.
My impression of the Incubator at
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/din is that it appears to have
legitimate content. It's very basic: the pages have practically no
formatting, images or links, but the text appears to be fine, and the pages
are not too short.
Technically, most of the pages were written by User:Dinkawiki (Prof. Myhill
himself); most of the anonymous edits there were probably by him as well.
In the last couple of weeks other users started uploading articles. Prof.
Myhill says that most of the pages were actually written by other Dinka
speakers (see the email below) and he only helped them upload them. In the
last few days other people started joining the effort, although this is a
recent development.
I don't know the language, and if anybody wants to verify with another
expert that this is indeed Dinka, it would be fine with me. Maybe Oliver
can help with this—in the previous thread he mentioned he knows people who
can read this language.
Other than that, I'd be flexible and support approving this.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amir Aharoni <aaharoni(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 2017-04-26 15:07 GMT+03:00
Subject: Fwd: Starting a Dinka Wikipedia
To: Amir Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: john <john(a)research.haifa.ac.il>
Date: ср, 19 апр. 2017 г. в 18:19
Subject: Starting a Dinka Wikipedia
To: <aaharoni(a)wikimedia.org>
Dear Amir,
This is in connection to opening a Wikipedia in Dinka. We have translated
more than 100 articles and put them them in the Incubator, and we have also
translated all of the terms needed to open a Wikipedia. Almost all of the
translations were done at 5 workshops of Akutmɛ̈t Latueŋ Thuɔŋjäŋ (the
Dinka Language Development Association, or DILDA) in Juba, South Sudan, in
the last 2 and a half years. I participated in these workshop but the
translations were done by the Dinka participants; there were about 25-30
translators at each workshop, but the specific people involved changed
somewhat from one workshop to the next so that I would guess maybe 50
different people participated in doing the translations. A few of the
translations (maybe 5 or 6) were done by me and other members of the
Facebook group of the same name. DILDA in Juba is a private NGO which has
existed since around 2006 with about 60 dues-paying members, all of them
Dinkas and citizens of South Sudan, and it is registered as an NGO with the
South Sudanese government; the Facebook group of the same name has existed
for about a year and has 12,800 members, the overwhelming majority of whom
do not live in South Sudan. Very few of the people participating in the
Juba workshops are in the Facebook group (maybe 3 or 4). I uploaded all of
the translations to the Incubator myself although I did not do the
translations myself, because I have more consistent access to the internet
in Israel than do the DILDA members in South Sudan, because I wanted to
regularize the orthography according to the conventions we agreed on at the
workshops, and because I did not realize that this would create the
impression that I had done all of the translations myself.
There is some urgency to get this Wikipedia approved and on the internet in
the next week or two. Until now all of DILDA's activities have been in
Juba, because this is the effectively the only city in South Sudan and
because this is the only place where members of the different dialect
groups live together. However, May 1 to May 15 of this year, a number of
DILDA members and I will be traveling around South Sudan to meet
representatives of the state governments (there are 10 Dinka-speaking
states) to talk to them about the organization and its work and to begin to
coordinate our activities with the work of the state governments. It has
been our hope that we will be able to show them the Dinka Wikipedia so that
they will understand that our work is serious and that the Dinka language
is being developed so as to be used in a wide variety of functions, so that
it can and should be used in more functions and not excluded from
government and education in favor of English (only a tiny majority of
Dinkas can function in English (perhaps 2% of them), while Dinka is spoken
by about 4 million people). Dinkas are in principle very supportive of the
idea of using their language for all written functions but they are simply
not aware that this is possible because they do not now about DILDA's
activities. The trip around South Sudan was planned at this time so as to
come as soon as possible after we completed the translations of 100
articles in March and before the rains begin in South Sudan in June and
make traveling around the country effectively impossible until next year.
It is therefore very important that the Dinka Wikipedia be approved as
quickly as possible.
Thank you very much for your help and best wishes,
John Myhill
John Myhill
Professor of Linguistics
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Haifa
Mt. Carmel, Haifa, 31905
Israel
Gerard and I were talking today about this issue. Here is the proposal
to be added into the LPP if accepted. Gerard's parts are related to
the traditional LangCom requirements, my parts are about the
organizations. Feel free to fix my English, add whatever you think
it's important for the amendment itself etc. (Asaf, Carlos, you are
encouraged to give your input in relation to the organizational part.)
Note that this proposal assumes that both Wikimedia and non-Wikimedia
organizations would be able to propose a project for fast approval.
* * *
Fast approval assumes that the Language committee would approve
previously eligible first Wikimedia project in particular language
under certain conditions without necessity for the project to pass the
process inside of Incubator (which usually lasts at least six months,
but likely a couple of years).
The main condition for fast approval is officially expressed support
by particular organization, which would guarantee that the project
would be viable for the next two years.
Organization has to have the following attributes:
* Officially incorporated organization inside of the country where
significant population of speakers of the target language live.
* Annual and strategic plan.
* Track record of successfully finished projects.
* Commitment to transparent work.
To do that, organization has to do the following:
* Translate 500 most common MediaWiki messages in the target language
to immediately show its commitment. (NOTE: I think that few hours of
translation job is reasonable immediate requirement; we could discuss
about it.)
* Present to the Language committee the proposal for the project. That
could be a program of editathons in particular area, targeting
speakers of one or more languages without any Wikimedia project.
* Give formal guarantee that the Wikimedia-related work with
particular linguistic group will last at least two years.
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
User:George Ho poked us [1] in relation to the proposals for closing
projects [2]. I went there to deal with the simplest cases, but,
again, Moldovan...
There are a couple of obvious reasons why this issue hasn't been
solved for a long time. Most importantly, there are *some* people who
use and want to use that orthography, so the logic says that it's not
on us to interfere with it, but to wait for the native speakers
(actually, "native writers") to appear.
We've been waiting for ~12 years and I think we could wait for as long
as it's necessary.
But I was reading about the issue again. You know, a kind of
compulsive reading: I knew I won't get any new information, as I'd
read all of the materials and Wikipedia articles a number of times,
but I was reading anyway.
However, it was productive at last and I've changed my mind.
The value of learning that particular orthography by Moldovan pupils
in Transnitria is around zero. All of them are likely native in
Russian and, outside of the specific usage, interesting to the
specialists (likely just historians), the whole corpus written in
Moldovan Cyrillic is likely the subset of what's written in Russian.
In other words, as soon as a Transitrian Moldovan learns
Romanian/Moldovan Latin orthography, as better for her or him. And we
should support it.
So, I tend to suggest to the Board backing up and deletion of the
projects in Moldovan. However, I want to hear what you think about it
before the final proposal. I would also suggest that we do not make
the future requests eligible as long as we do not see a substantial
number of native contributors. (Note that nobody appeared since 2005
or so.)
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Proposals_for_closing_projects#Older_o…
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects
Mostly, I have no preference one way or the other about this subject. (Actually, I do: I would prefer it if the Romanian language community would allow Cyrillic pages in their projects. But they seem pretty opposed.)
But I do want to point out that since January 2011, the root page for the potential "Wp/mo" test project has pretty directly discouraged the creation of a test. So I'm not sure that "Note that nobody appeared since 2005 or so" is entirely fair. (Remember that the Moldovan language codes have been retired since 2008. So by policy Incubator should not allow these tests, unless LangCom specifically allows us to do so.)
Steven White (User:StevenJ81), Incubator administrator
Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>