If I may, I second the approval of the Inari Saami Wikipedia. Of course, my vote can be
discarded since I'm involved in the project, but even if I weren't, I think this
project should be approved since the quality of many articles is high enough that I use
them as the source articles when creating articles into Northern Saami via translation.
-K
________________________________
From: Langcom <langcom-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Jon Harald Søby
<jhsoby(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 11:16 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee <langcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Langcom] Proposed approval of Inari Sámi Wikipedia
Hi all,
I would like to propose the approval of the Inari Sámi Wikipedia [1].
The activity has been good and stable all year, with several active contributors [2], and
the most used messages have all been translated [3].
We can safely bypass the verification step for this project, since our very own Yupik is
one of the active contributors and knows Inari Sámi; in addition, Trond Trosterud
(User:Trondtr), who is a professor of Sámi language technology at the Giellatekno
department of the University of Tromsø, is also one of the active contributors. Trondtr
wrote a request for us to approve the Inari Sámi Wikipedia, which I'm pasting in its
entirety below, as it gives a much better overview than what I could:
Proposal for a Wikipedia version for Inari Saami
We hereby propose that the Inari Saami incubator Wikipedia be converted into a
full-fledged Wikipedia, smn.wikipedia.org<http://smn.wikipedia.org>
The language community
Inari Saami has appr. 450 speakers. This makes it a small language community in Wikipedia
terms. It is still worth noting that Inari Saami is probably one of the most, if not the
most successful revitalisation processes in the world. During the last decades the
language community has organised language nests for a generation of Inari Saami children,
and it has taught the language to key members of the middle generation. The third phase of
the revitalisation, strengthening the literacy of the language, is now in its initial
phase. This phase is named “100 new writers of Inari Saami” and has “1000 new pages of
youth fiction” as one of its subprojects. The last decade has also seen language
technology projects for Inari Saami, resulting in a spellchecker, comprehensive online
dictionaries, keyboards with predictive writing, and programs for machine translation.
At present, Inari Saami is one of the four official languages of the Inari municipality
and the Finnish Saami parliament. It is taught at all levels of instruction from
kindergarten up to and including PhD level courses. The activists behind the “100 new
writers of Inari Saami” are planning a campaign for children in high school to contribute
to the Inari Saami Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia
Inari Saami has been in the incubator since 2012, with several quite good articles from an
early stage. In spring 2020, the Inari Saami Language Association (Anarâškielâ servi)
arranged Wikipedia writing workshops. Over the past six months, the Inari Saami Wikipedia
version has seen edits every day, usually 30–50 edits a day. There are more than 1,000
articles and a substantial part of these are of good quality. The short articles form good
and coherent article sets. Finnish municipalities, countries of the world, languages in
the Uralic language family, Finnish authors, grammar and society are all such categories
for which there is reasonably good coverage of short but informative articles. A list has
also been made of the articles that are vital to the Inari Saami Wikipedia. As for
localisation, the basic requirement has been met, as all strings in the set of core
messages have been translated into Inari Saami.
We expect that a separate Wikipedia for Inari Saami will make it more visible than it is
today, and make its users compare it with the much larger North Saami Wikipedia.
[1]
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/smn
[2]
https://meta.toolforge.org/catanalysis/index.php?cat=0&title=Wp/smn&…
[3]
https://robin.toolforge.org/?tool=codelookup&code=smn
--
mvh
Jon Harald Søby