Dear colleagues:
I am pleased to say that just about all of the RFL requests that were opened in 2012 or earlier have been addressed. There are only six exceptions, which I will summarize here:
* There are requests from 2010 for Wikipedia tests in Eastern Balochi and in the Balochi macrolanguage. Gerard marked a related request for Southern Balochi as "eligible" in 2008. And there is a related request for Western Balochi dating to 2014. I will address the issues associated with these in a different email, probably tomorrow. * Wikipedia Simple French (from my August 7 message): This would be in français fondamental; this Committee has previously stated that a test in that defined version of Simple French would be allowable. The original requester has an RfC open on French Wikipedia asking the community to host the incubation. I think the RfC is going to pass. If it does, I will mark the request "eligible", and point contributors to a landing page on frwiki. * If it doesn't, I'll come back to the Committee. My inclination in that case would be mark the project eligible, but recommend that the community do the Incubation on Incubator Plus (to be moved to Miraheze soon)—mainly so that we don't have to start explaining why that simple project is being allowed to open on Incubator, but others are not. I think a Simple French community would be amenable to that. * Wikipedia Pinyin (from my July 30 message): The test running on Incubator (under the ISO 639-3 code for Mandarin) has about 250 pages. As I said in that message, there are arguments on both sides. Would people please look again at that and provide some input? You can do that on langcom-l if you prefer, of course. * Wikipedia Prussian (from my July 16 message): Michael supported (or at least wanted to look further as to whether the revival was sufficiently robust to support the project). Gerard opposed. If people haven't responded in another week, I will probably mark "on hold" pending someone's determining whether the revival is sufficiently robust. * Wikipedia Ottoman Turkish (from my August 7 message): Is there a robust enough literature to support this? Are there enough people who actually study and use this language (even in writing) to make it worthwhile. I don't think a script converter would do the job here, and Ottoman Turkish tends to borrow more heavily from Arabic and Persian than modern Turkish does. Thoughts?
Steven
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I said it would probably be easy enough to find out, but I don’t have time to do that.
On 20 Aug 2018, at 18:07, Steven White Koala19890@hotmail.com wrote:
• Wikipedia Prussian (from my July 16 message): Michael supported (or at least wanted to look further as to whether the revival was sufficiently robust to support the project). Gerard opposed. If people haven't responded in another week, I will probably mark "on hold" pending someone's determining whether the revival is sufficiently robust.
- Wikipedia Pinyin (from my July 30 message): The test running on
Incubator (under the ISO 639-3 code for Mandarin) has about 250 pages. As I said in that message, there are arguments on both sides. Would people please look again at that and provide some input? You can do that on langcom-l if you prefer, of course.
It's probably even easier to use language converter to convert existing
Chinese Wikipedia into pinyin using language converter than converting between traditional/simplified Chinese so I don't get why a separate Wikipedia for zh-cmn-Latn would be needed. The standard orthography of Chinese is already very close to the spoken standard Mandarin variant and most (not all) Chinese characters only have 1 pronunciation so a simple machine conversion should be able to pretty reliably convert the existing Chinese Wikipedia into pinyin. The space delimitation between vocabulary might be a problem but that's only for good-looking/easy-reading purpose. [That is, if Chinese Wikipedia editor want to add a pinyin version to the site's language converter, which I personally don't think that is the case. Someone can still raise the question about language converter on Chinese Wikipedia Village Pump though to see how many people support the language converter proposal]. As for those existing 250 articles, I checked some of them, and many of them seems to be word-to-word, character-to-character copies of Chinese Wikipedia article that whoever put those article there didn't even mention their source in edit history or whatever. They should be deleted for copyright violation. Some will need to see if there're any content that are actually not copy-paste from Chinese Wikipedia before making decision about what to do about it. One of the reason being stated regarding why a pinyin version of the Mandarin Wikipedia is needed was that it will help illiterate people to read and edit Wikipedia. I guess it would make more sense for Wikipedia to integrate a Text-to-speech module and expand available accessibility options to reach those audiences.