Dear Wikimedians,
Some of you might be recovering from the Wikimania fatigue. Those of you who have already recovered, I wanted to pick your brain about something that came up multiple times during discussions but none really seem to have a clear answer.
Which script (writing system) an oral language speaker would use for creating an entry on (gateway [1]) projects like Wiktionary or Wikibooks or even uploading a list of words on Commons using a tool like Lingua Libre? Will it be the script used for the official language of the region where the former language is from?[2] This is a bit controversial as native speakers of many indigenous languages would see this as a form of colonization. Will it be the w:International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)? This is probably the least controversial but a common and average user might not be able to read IPA as the latter was created by linguists and was created for linguistic and scholarly studies rather than for everyday use.
Wikimedians who are native speakers of languages with less written/recorded documentation and individuals who work on such languages are more encouraged to share their inputs based on past experience.
1. Gateway project: This is a made-up term to define the Wikimedia projects that are more welcoming to newbies and do not require stringent citation as almost all oral languages would lack that. It was fascinating to see Amir challenging that it only takes about 30 seconds to add an entry to Wiktionary (
