Hoi,
We have a situation where it makes sense to provide a platform for the  Noongar language and culture. As you will read in the thread, Wikipedia is not the platform for this because of the hostility against subjects that lack "sources". The Noongar language is largely oral so much of the content will be in English..

So the question for you and the Wikimedia board is: can we provide room for them probably under a different platform name?
Thanks,
     GerardM

On 19 December 2017 at 10:26, Gnangarra <gnangarra@wikimedia.org.au> wrote:
Kaya

I did raise my concerns about the use of english when in Berlin and was told that it was ok, I'll focus on getting more of it translated though I hope this doesnt hold the project.  

One of our key issues is that Noongar is an oral language and written form is the result of european records, those records have created a situation where the written language is different dependent on the language the person spoke.  We people like Salvado a Spanish Benedictine monk who's spelling used a mixture of spanish and latin depending on the sounds.  Then there are various English, Welsh and Celtic settlers along with dutch, french, and german explorers all of whom recorded it in their own orthographies...  One top of the region in which the language was spoken is larger than UK and like the UK areas had their own unique dialects despite speaking the same language.  The beauty of this that some words can have more than 25 different spellings.   

The Noongar community came together in the early 1990's to establish a more consistent use of spellings to enable the language to be taught in schools, currently there are about 50 schools across the WA teaching Noongar.    The simple act of translating the 762 most important messages has been a complex task of consultations with many groups, spread across the regions.   When it came to writing content we encouraged two things one was localised spelling as we do for english and recording the knowledge(Katitjin).   Knowing all of this background and having experienced many a waagnkininy about language over the last 4 years ( all early work was hosted by WMAU)   the decision was taken for inclusiveness to allow english while the community is being built as we dont want to be seen a preferencing any specific one of the 15-20 different regional groups.

Because of the survival of Noongar and continual use as a language despite laws, aided by it's adoption in to South West Australian english its probably one of the most complex living languages Wikimedia Movement will ever see.     

The value and future benefits to the movement of allowing the move now far exceeds the cost in using a few words of english in its initial phase.   As always members are welcome to come to WA to experience firsthand a living language and culture that has been in continual use for 50,000+ years.

Boodar
Gnangarra



On 18 December 2017 at 21:43, Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Gnangarra,

I'm quite confused, because practically all the samples I looked at from https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wp/nys are articles in English, not in Nyungar. A new language edition of Wikipedia needs to be in that language, not content in another language (in this case English) about that language and its culture, etc. The content as it presently stands should either be incorporated into the English Wikipedia (although with their stringent notability criteria I'm afraid a lot, if not most it, would be deleted) or into a separate wiki.

Is there something I'm missing?

2017-12-16 4:05 GMT+01:00 Gnangarra <gnangarra@wikimedia.org.au>:
Kaya Folks

We have completed all the tasks asked of us in berlin and continue to expand the translations and the article content.  As I see it we are ready to go, 

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Nyungar

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