From: Mike Cleven mikecleven@gmail.com ... I"m also interested in seeing more advancement of the OTHER wiki-arenas, not just Wikipedia; I've mentioned WikiTravel already, WikiNews also could use a good Canadian contingent but is seriously staff-limited; making it easier and quicker and more accessible to non-wikipedians could result in a new, independent, news service in Canada, which is much-needed; but right now they only have, as i recall, eight article reviewers, meaning taht the time between someone submits something and when it passes review to get published it's rarely any longer "news".....I'd also be curious about what marketing/packaging efforts there are for the saleable aspects of WikiMedia technologies, e.g. private wikis, corporate wikis, assocation wikis, and what those licensing/costs issues are....
I agree that we shouldn't just focus on Wikipedia, but on a related note, we also shouldn't focus solely on the English language. That doesn't just mean extending out efforts to French, but also native languages such as Inuktitut, Cree and Ojibwe. Then there are what (if anything) we should do about immigrant languages. (Did you know more German and Ukranian are spoken by more people as a mother tongue in Saskatchewan than French?). The good news is that a lot what Wiki Canada can do in terms of freeing the world's knowledge is completely independent of any language or Wikimedia Project.
Tom W
Well, a once-very-active user, OldManRivers, aka Dustin Rivers, has been working hard to revive the Squamish language, I'd already suggested to him he hit up the Gates Foundation or whomever for localization into Squamish (he's gone from being one of a handful to leading successful classes for over 90 people, and a langauge revival is underway). I"m not sure which is the most widely-spoken FN language in BC, Tsimshian or Shuswap I think.....and at the Canadian level I suppose a language like Cree or Mi'kmaq or Dene might have enough to consider wikipedification.....just an idea for future thought
But on the subject of languages, some project to insure that's what on the interwikis matches updates to English Wikipedia should be on the backburner somewhere; as some of you may know I've been embroiled in a defense of English Wikipedia vs a Franco-Columbian on Talk:History of British Columbia who says we're part of an organized effort to "suppress" francophone history in BC...that no-win argument aside,.in the course of that I went and checked the French version of the article, which has nothing more on it than the English one does (it's pretty much a straight translation, from an older version). It does point up that some kind of effort to bliingualize all CAnadian articles would seem to be de rigeur (and donations to wikimedia.cafrom the B&B office could be forthcoming, too), but would require the collaboration of people on the "otehr side of the linguistic fence"; I'm sure there's lots of Quebec and Acadian articles which could use translation into English, also; this is all probably part of WP:Translation but maybe there could be a Canadian workgroup there...Thee's certain interWikipedias that have a fair bit of coverage of Canada - the German, Japanese, Chinese ones - lately I've noticed an increase in Russian and Polish interwikis. A lot of BC history and geography articles have Spanish co-respondents because of amounting interest, it seems, in Spain and/or Latin America about the early history of New Spain in the Northwest....
So any of us who are multi-lingual, even "semi"-multilingual, might consider keeping an eye on the other-language wikis, and maybe we could come up with a coordination project of some kind.....I'm sure in many cases there might be stuff in other-language bios that should bev in the English versions, e.g. as per the governors of Russian America in the Russian and Finnish and Estonian ones (Furuhjelm, for exampe, was Finnish). Could be, by a more-Canadian examplel, that the Ray Hnatyshyn article might have more on his ancestry/family background in the Ukrainian one - or that there isn't a bio for him at all in Ukrainian wiki....as with French and the B&B office, an organized project re the other-language wikis might be able to get funds from Multiculturalism Canada.....and no doubt similar funding might be forthcoming from INAC or somewhere to help someone launch a Mi'kmaq or Ojibway wiki etc....
More coffee, just offering thoughts/observations
MC
On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 8:44 AM, Tom W tompw@hotmail.com wrote:
From: Mike Cleven mikecleven@gmail.com ... I"m also interested in seeing more advancement of the OTHER wiki-arenas,
not
just Wikipedia; I've mentioned WikiTravel already, WikiNews also could
use a
good Canadian contingent but is seriously staff-limited; making it easier and quicker and more accessible to non-wikipedians could result in a new, independent, news service in Canada, which is much-needed; but right now they only have, as i recall, eight article reviewers, meaning taht the
time
between someone submits something and when it passes review to get
published
it's rarely any longer "news".....I'd also be curious about what marketing/packaging efforts there are for the saleable aspects of
WikiMedia
technologies, e.g. private wikis, corporate wikis, assocation wikis, and what those licensing/costs issues are....
I agree that we shouldn't just focus on Wikipedia, but on a related note, we also shouldn't focus solely on the English language. That doesn't just mean extending out efforts to French, but also native languages such as Inuktitut, Cree and Ojibwe. Then there are what (if anything) we should do about immigrant languages. (Did you know more German and Ukranian are spoken by more people as a mother tongue in Saskatchewan than French?). The good news is that a lot what Wiki Canada can do in terms of freeing the world's knowledge is completely independent of any language or Wikimedia Project.
Tom W
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