New subject: [Langcom] Proposed approval of Inari Sámi Wikipedia

23 Sep 2020

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

 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