SJ wrote:
I don't know where to put this partly-finished
text... Three related thoughts:
1) 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.
--
Robert Scott Horning