Joanot Martorell wrote:
2005/11/22, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>:
2. To discourage the creation of new Wikipedia
editions in dialects
which do not significantly differ from existing Wikipedias. We want to
keep from being hoaxed, and from falling into political traps.
For dialects, then, we want to require a much higher threshold before
allowing the wikipedia -- we need a good reason to start it. A
"Bavarian" Wikipedia proposal would need a much much stronger rationale
before we start it than "German". Obviously.
This point isn't enough to clarify when whe should or should not create a new
dialect wikipedia, because it's using the unique criteria of interlegibility.
By exemple, Catalan (my native lang) and Occitan are mutually interlegible in
text written, or between Neapolitan and Italian. And for some persons
Portuguese and Spanish are interlegible too, but they are considered as
independent languages. I think that perhaps the point to consider the inclusion
of a new dialect wikipedia would be better moving around the
exclusionist-inclusionist poles.
I don't think we're talking about an interlegibility criterion here, at
least that's not how I understand Jimbo's proposal. Certainly nobody
objects to separate wikis for the Scandinavian languages. The issue is
not whether native speakers of one language can read material in another
language. It's whether there are native speakers who actually read and
write in this as a literary language at all, as opposed to reading and
writing in some "other" language of which theirs is merely a dialect.
Expanding on Jimbo's point, here's the problem with dialect Wikipedias
(leaving aside, for a moment, the thorny problem of deciding whether
something is a dialect or a language). Dialects tend to be in a similar
position to constructed languages, in that they have no pre-existing
literature and their orthography has to be invented to a significant
degree. When the standards these establish are missing, we really have
no factual basis from which to write in such a language. Inventing
spelling or grammar while you write the encyclopedia, just like
inventing facts while you write the encyclopedia, is perpetrating an
intellectual fraud and a hoax.
However, both dialects and constructed languages of long standing may
develop their own literature and a more or less standard orthography,
which would enable us to accept them as potential Wikipedia languages.
--Michael Snow