On 12/27/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Nathan wrote:
I think that preserving a language is a good goal, but it is one that Wikipedia is not well suited for and is not intended to fulfill. Creating an automatically translated article on every city and town in the US is not a way to 'preserve' a constructed or dead language. If the point is to aggregate knowledge in a way that is accessible to as many people as possible, how does a Wikipedia in a constructed language (a code, really) serve that point?
While Wikipedia, where we have original writing, is not best suited to these small languages, the same is not the case for some sister projects, notabnly Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikisource. Constructed languages need to be viewed differently from dead or endangered languages, because most of them need to have a culture constructed as well as a language.
Sources in other languages are valid sources. This means that a small language Wikipedia may be completely based on sources written in other language.
And bot-generated articles are the best example of doing so because they *are* based on valid sources.