An'n 24.05.2011 19:13, hett Ilario Valdelli schreven:
On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 4:47
PM,<me(a)marcusbuck.org> wrote:
A single dedicated person could be enough to put
a project in motion.
A dean of a Nigerian college who integrates Wikipedia article creation
in the instruction plan ("if you create 200 Nigerian pidgin Wikipedia
articles this semester you'll get X extra credit points for your
degree") could be enough to get the project to 100,000 articles in a
year (200 articles*2 semesters*250 students = 100,000 articles in a
year).
I don't agree. Wikipedia is a "collaborative" encyclopedia, it's
not
an encyclopedia.
It means that one person cannot "drive" the project because he will
impose a single point of view.
I didn't say anything about a single person
somehow taking control. I
just said that a single person is enough to kickstart a Wikipedia into
vivid activity.
It makes sense where there are no encyclopedia in this
language and
Wikipedia can be the first one, but it should be interesting to
analyze why there were no encyclopedias before.
I have experienced this solution in some minor languages and it
doesn't work.
Feel free to share links so others can learn from it.
It's difficult to aggregate people around a small
core
of articles because they are attracted by more active languages or
because they don't have sufficient knowledge of their daily language
to put their ideas in written sentences. It seems strange, but if
someone should use their daily language (technically it's a "change of
linguistic register") to write something, they like to switch language
and to use English or Hindi or Chinese.
Some languages don't have a literature, don't have words to translate
technical words of legal words, don't have a dictionary or a formal
grammar. It means that the community should build their written
language around Wikipedia in order to start to contribute. It's
another project.
There's hardly any language in the world with a sizable number
of
speakers that hasn't ever been written. All languages have something to
build on. Of course you won't be able to write about quantum physics in
Nigerian pidgin without importing terms from English. The solution:
start with writing articles about topics that are relevant to the
community. If it's relevant to the community they will have words for
it. If the language lacks a write dictionary: collect the words in
Wiktionary.
The problems you name are challenges that need to be addressed while
building the project but they are certainly no showstoppers.
Marcus Buck
User:Slomox