Noongar Wikipedia - Langcom

18 May 2018

User:OosWesThoesBes, who is a sysop and active contributor on Incubator and Multilingual
Wikisource, has been collaborating with User:Gnangarra of the Noongar project.  They make
the following comment and suggestion:

The main issue here seems to lie in two things: 1. the desire to spread/record knowledge
of the local culture; 2. the inability of many tribal people (no offense meant, I'm
not from Australia, nor am I a native English speaker, so please do correct my terminology
[I'd use "aboriginal"–SJW]) to speak or understand the Nyungar language
fluently. A simple solution to this would be the creation of a separate namespace in which
English translations are provided, while the pages themselves are written in Nyungar. This
will keep the main namespace free of English, while the knowledge to the culture is still
available to those interested, who are not able to understand or have difficulty
understanding the language itself. This way, the Wikipedia can be used both to spread the
knowledge of the Nyungar culture, as well as providing a base for a broad encyclopedia
written in the Nyungar language about all subjects.

In response to a question from MF-Warburg, Gnangarra promises that all articles will be
completely written in Nyungar as well as in English. And OosWesThoesBes has committed to
help with the implementation.

It seems to me that this solution would satisfy LangCom's requirement that the project
be written in Nyungar, as well as the community's desire that there also be English
available to support wider dissemination of information.

I'd request the Committee's comments/opinions on this idea.

Steven

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