Fwd: Starting a Dinka Wikipedia - Langcom

26 Apr 2017


      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@wikimedia.org
Date: 2017-04-26 15:07 GMT+03:00
Subject: Fwd: Starting a Dinka Wikipedia
To: Amir Aharoni ‫‎amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il‎‬
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: john john@research.haifa.ac.il
Date: ср, 19 апр. 2017 г. в 18:19
Subject: Starting a Dinka Wikipedia
To: aaharoni@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