Hoi JP,

 

When I saw your draft main page, that reminded me of the joint wikipedia for Alemannic, Alsacian, Suebian and Swiss German, cf. http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houptsyte

I tried to find out how they assign a specific dialect to an article but was not successful in determining that (I’m a linguist, not an IT expert). Maybe you’re already aware of what they’re doing and to what extent it’s similar or different to what you’re trying to do.

 

Best,

BT

 


From: JP Béland [mailto:lebo.beland@gmail.com]
Sent: 07 September 2012 01:51
To: Languages discussion and Wikimedia Indigenous Languages
Subject: Re: [Languages] Extension to indicate dialects

 


I agree with you when saying the communities are too small to sustain two editions of Wikipedia, and that's why I even think Innu dialects should remain on the main Cree Wikipedia, hence my question about how effectively index all dialects to make it easy to find them and for contributor of another dialect to use them to translate in its own dialect.

I just remembered that I had created a stub for a main page 8 months ago to try to show how we could sort all dialects on the Cree Wikipedia:
http://cr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amqui/Main_page

What do you think?

Thanks,
JP

2012/9/6 Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com>

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:54 PM, JP Béland <lebo.beland@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good day Milos (and others if you know about that),
>
> I'd like to investigate that more please if you could assist me. My contact
> at the Cree Cultural Institute (after I told him we could create an Innu
> Wikipedia separate from the Cree one which has Innu articles right now) that
> we (may) should divide the Innu into dialects as well because of huge
> phonological differences between West and East. On Ethnologue, where Innu is
> called Montagnais (ISO code moe), they mention Western Montagnais and
> Eastern Montagnais (exactly as described by the guy from the Cree Cultural
> Insitute), but they don't mention any "sub-codes" for those. See
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=moe .
>
> That being said, what would be the advantages of having those codes for the
> "sub-dialects"? I mean, the intent is not to have separate Wikipedias. It's
> perfectly possible to sort the articles according to those dialect on one
> Wikipedia without having codes.

If the information on Ethnologue is correct, it suggests implicitly
that there is one standard language; or that the differences between
the dialects are not big.

But, anyway, no matter of differences, the population is too small to
be able to drive two Wikipedia editions. I suggest creating one Innu
Wikipedia with possibility to write in all dialects. Or, if possible,
to create a kind of conversion engine in the future, so all
communities would be able to contribute and read in their own dialect
on the same pages.


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