I had 3 concerns (per my original email). One of them was duplication of efforts which is not a concern anymore for me.
The other 2 were those dialects being mostly spoken with no stable orthography, and the third to requote here was:
It wont be hard to imagine groups interested in promoting this canvassing just to prove their point, do we want to get involved in such an argument? is it wikipedia's place to? isnt such a statement already made by Wikimedia creating one of the first bodies of written text in the language?
I dont care whether the argument in my country goes whichever way, my concern is *NOT* political as such (if you meant by that whether If I am on either side of this fence), I have been called by Gerard 'a champion of standard Arabic' , which is not true, I dont oppose Masry or the others because I think Arabic is 'best'. I just dont think WMF should take a stance. and *changing* the status quo is doing so. Why do we claim we are a secondary source of information? for the exact same reasons IMHO. In my mind, the best way to go about those languages is wait and see if their actual speakers adopt them as written and THEN grant them wikipedias. i.e, have one of the rules (beside having the sacred ISO code) be ' The proposers should point to a substantial body of written literature' or something like that.
Also, the canvassing goes back to Aphaia's point, If people will be writing on this wp just to prove a point, there is bound to be heavy systemic bias created not just by the normal bias of the population of editor, but rather, by the fact that the language itself is in the middle of reforming.
On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 1:40 AM, Ting Chen wing.philopp@gmx.de wrote:
Muhammad Alsebaey wrote:
It is not a political stand that the first body of written non-fiction
work
published in Egyptian Arabic will be on Wikipedia? I said before that
there
is an ongoing debate in Egypt about the adoption of Egyptian Arabic as written in addition to being spoken in order to bolster the national identity of Egypt. This debate is currently dead in the water AFAIK, with
a
lot of argument going for and against. Wikipedia hosting the first non-fiction written work *is* a political stand in this debate IMHO.
No, in no way. You must simply understand that we do not make decisions because one politiker want something is true or another politiker want something to be wrong. If your concern is a political, then I give Gerard right. We follow international standards. If you have a problem. Go to ISO and complain there.
Ting
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