SJ wrote:
I don't know where to put this partly-finished text... Three related thoughts:
- One of the reasons given for speedily deleting Wikimania
proceedings from wikibooks without discussion was that some of the content was not in English. I do not think that having part of a book intended for English-speaking readers in a foreign language should be grounds for deletion.
You have totally misunderstood this statement. The Wikimania content was never intended to be used for foriegn language instruction. It was publication of research papers or original source material that had a further strike against it as not even being written in English. Wikibooks has a long history of foriegn langauge textbooks... indeed some that have become book of the month. Don't confuse this issue here, and the Farsi Wikibook is quite welcome on Wikibooks for many of the reasons that I outlined against the Wikimania content... because this Wikibook is clearly a part of the overall Wikibooks content.
In addition, English Wikibooks was known as textbook.wikipedia.com (btw... a redirect that currently doesn't exist and was linked from a number of external websites) At one point a fairly healthy non-English speaking community was on Wikibooks. A decision in the past was to break up the various Wikibook projects into seperate langauge domains, where the content written in the various languages would be moved out of the now English Wikibooks and into the other various independent projects in different langauges. I was not a part of that decision, but there is still quite a bit of content left over from those days, some of it being deleted now after verification that the content has been moved or improved in the language that it is written in.
Nowhere is there an attempt to remove this content (a textbook about learning Farsi), which is as well done as most of current foreign langauge textbooks.
A valid complaint, however, is to argue about the role of MediaWiki software in dealing with right to left and left to right writing systems simultaneously, which is a technical issue that content of this nature will have to deal with. When I've had to include quotations in Arabic or Hebrew (related writing systems to Farsi) I have had some problems in trying to perform cut and paste operations, and in general rearranging content within the edit windows of MediaWiki implementations... or even any wiki at all. Often letters will drop out and other problems as well. This doesn't seem to be as much of a problem when all of the content is using one writing system, as (obviously) the Arabic and Hebrew Wikimedia projects seem to be doing just fine... with even growing development communities. Even the Farsi projects seem to be enjoying at least some moderate success. I would imagine that inclusion of Latin characters in Farsi-language projects is a bit easier to do and not fraught with as many problem, but I don't have as much experience in that environment.