Good questions, Raphael

 

  • Will this new Twi Wikipedia be specific in terms of being Asante, Akuapim or Fante?

 

Yes, it’ll be specific to one, namely, Asante Twi. However, that raises the question, ‘How about Akuapim or Fante?’, which is legit to ask.

 

Encompassing all would have been ideal, but that will give in to chaos. But, here’s a probable solution.

 

Will it thus make sense to mix them, but not in-articles, in separate articles? What I mean is, Person/Place A’s article could be labeled as Akuapim, yet another article of Person/Place B labeled as Asante.

 

So an article labeled as Akuapim will mean, whoever edits it, *must* stick to Akuapim for that article. By default, every article will be in Asante unless otherwise indicated

 

That way, it doesn’t appear that the other dialects are sidelined. Just a probable solution though there, *but*, the Twi will be Asante by default.

 

  • Are we going to have one Wikipedia for all? Or we will be looking at developing these individual Akan languages subsequently?

 

So yeah, one for Asante, with room for article-specific dialect options.

 

From: Raphael Berchie
Sent: Friday, November 8, 2019 1:54 PM
To: Wikimedia Ghana User Group
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-GH] Akan vs Twi Wikipedia - Next Steps?

 

 

Hello Rex,

 

I think this is a great initiative as a contributor to the Twi Wikipedia I get confused a lot of time. I believe if we streamline one it will help us all. 

 

I however have some concerns. Will this new Twi Wikipedia be specific in terms of being Asante, Akuapim or Fante? Or it will encompass all? I am asking this because although all these Akan languages look similar they are different in many ways. I edit in Asante Twi and find it difficult to write or even understand certain works in Fante and Akuapem.

 

Are we going to have one Wikipedia for all? Or we will be looking at developing these individual Akan languages subsequently?

 

Regards.

 

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 3:27 AM Rexford <nkansahrexford@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Currently there are two local Wikipedias related to the Akan language, namely, tw.wikipedia.org (Twi) and ak.wikipedia.org (Akan)

 

In Telegram (the African Wikimedia group), we’ve been having discussions on going forward with both wikipedias. It is clear one of them needs to be dropped. Which to drop, we to an extent agree it should be the ak.wikipedia.org, and the tw.wikipedia.org maintained.

 

First of all, is that a good step? Any objection(s) to that?

 

The goal, if I understand clearly, of going forward with only one means having a streamlined effort in editing. Managing a Wikipedia language space is not easy, let alone two, and with the limited number of hands on deck for the local language, a single point of contribution appears much more worthwhile.

 

There are articles on both wikipedias at the moment, when the tw.wikipedia.org is the choice going forward (assuming there’s no objection), the next step would be to merge the few articles on ak.wikipedia.org into the tw.wikipedia.org

 

When all of that is copied over and merged, we can put in a word to ask for the ak.wikipedia.org can be shutdown (If that’s possible. I guess it is)

 

The above sounds like the way forward? Any thoughts?

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R