Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Friday 05 September 2008 18:46:32 Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
Yes, I think at this point we agree each other. Maybe we could consider a project category, whose purpose is the conservation of languages. As I wrote in a reply to Tim earlier I think MediaWiki can help a lot. But it must not be a Wikipedia.
Actually, this category has been discussed a countless number of times, and most often under a name of "wikicompendium". It would be good, for instance, for minor languages, where there may be not enough speakers to support a wikipedia and not so many sources to support a wikiquote or a wikisource, but if you put them all in one basket it may be a project with a chance to survive. The same is with the dead languages (with an obvious exception for latin, which is good enough to support all the projects), and possibly even with conlangs.
The problem is, that Wikipedia is by far and wide the most well-known name of all Wikimedia projects. Naming a project "Wikicompendium" would hurt recognition of the project, while naming it "Wikipedia" would help, and shouldn't hurt Wikipedia's recognition, even if technically it's not an encyclopedia.
That's true. But on the other hand, such a project is not for attracting a lot of people. It is a place for people to do conservation works for a small or already dead language. It would by nature not have a lot of editors and users. Maybe only the ethmologists who are doing the conservation works.
Ting