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(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
From: Mike
Cleven <mikecleven(a)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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