Hi all,
I would like to propose the dismantling of the language committee and creating a new one (not including Gerard, of course).
Why? Because it is chronically malfunctioning. Manifested in: # Gerard is forcing all his opinion, anything else is going nowhere. # Other members don't really care and leave it, unfortunately for us, to Gerard.
Background: I read about how unfair the LangCom before but I didn't really care because it wasn't affecting a language I care about. Then came the dreadful proposal for a dialect Wikipedia in my dialect, Egyptian dialect. At first, I wasn't sure in the beginning if I should support it or not, then I became sure if this should happen, it shouldn't happen on a platform like Wikipedia (for many reasons laid out in detail in the proposal page). I don't care if Ghaly and company (the people who made the proposal) started that on an independent website (Wikia or on an own domain for their campaign) but on Wikimedia, we should do the right thing (I hope). The proposal was approved (Gerard requires that you have the relevant ISO code and everything from there could be done, he is a bit annoyed now becuase of all the current proposals for dialect Wikipedias which were brought up by the Egyptian dialect Wikipedia proposal) and the technical team had no option but to create the wiki because Gerard gave it his blessings and the foundation didn't say a word (I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!).
Trivia (I like structure but..): * Gerard is talking about how good the localization of the Egyptian dialect, well, that is a natural thing when the localization is a matter of copy-pasting Arabic translation and converting it to a slang form or English words in Arabic (nothing wrong at all in that of course, we do it all the time, but we don't do it for the sake of looking hip (there is a certain language charisma we have in Egypt, that is, if you can speak English and mix English with Arabic to look cool. don't know if other countries have it), we do it only to introduce new words that we are unable to find their equivalent in Arabic (e.g. Acetylcysteine which is أسيتيل سيستئين in Arabic, basically English (latin) in Arabic).
* May be ISO is wrong: why people are taking ISO codes as absolute, don't-discuss matter? in our case, we have 22 dialects of Arabic and the pathetic decision to call them languages of the supposedly "Macro" language Arabic, that is nonsense and it should be amended, not the blind (if not stupid) opinion of making all these sorts of dialectical projects ( http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ara). I tried to contact the ISO, they say to contact the local office in my country ( http://www.eos.org.eg), and as always, they have dead emails, don't know about the phone numbers, I'm not even sure that anyone there would listen to a word of mine, besides, I wish to see changes before my expiry date is due.
* Gerard have the false delusion of protecting the freedom of Egyptians and taking us out of illiteracy into the light of knowledge by making a new Wikipedia in slang and dialect. well, you are *wrong*, you are doing quite the opposite and other people are helping you alas. hope you understand that someday.
* Wave of ignorance: a new wave of ignorance are upon us and I don't like Wikipedia being part of it.
* Did you know that when I tell people about this new Wikipedia, the consiperacy theory of the west dividing us is brought up? like it wasn't enough that the ar.wiki isn't appreciated because of the several issues we have. no, now we have another big issue created because of the carelessness of some people. arz.wiki is a regression, making people think of Wikipedia as an enemy is a regression.
* Did you know that what was rejected before, is being done on that arz.wiki? I'm talking about Arabic in latin characters Wikipedia. they have no objections there if you write Arabic in latin (a big no no in ar.wiki or any another respectable venue). dialect writing/Arabic in latin writing is for fun only, nothing serious.
* They have a template on arz.wiki which is placed on articles copied from ar.wiki that says ~"this article needs more egyptianizing" like the one on uncyclopedia "this article needs to be more uncyclopediac" or something like that (sorry for the lack of links).
* I think it would be doable to make a tab that Egyptianizes (or any other dialect) the Arabic article, that is, if we have some sort of conversion memory, that is if the dialect is stable (or standard), the dialect differs from a place to another, from a muhafazah to another ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhafazah). if anyone knows the technical method we could make a trial instead of the great mess of dialect Wikipedias. I'm not too sure about this compromise yet.
So, to sum it up: # Dissolve the current committee and make a new one of people who care. # Make all the discussions of the committee public and allow community members to comment and the committee really reads what they have to say. # Make sure that Gerard isn't on the new committee. # Treat ISO codes flexibly, they could be amended, they could be ignored if appropriate. # Undo the arz.wiki.
Pardon the long email, but I had to say what I have on that important issue, may be the new year would bring something else besides massacres.
--alnokta
Mohamed Magdy wrote:
- I think it would be doable to make a tab that Egyptianizes (or any other
dialect) the Arabic article, that is, if we have some sort of conversion memory, that is if the dialect is stable (or standard), the dialect differs from a place to another, from a muhafazah to another ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhafazah). if anyone knows the technical method we could make a trial instead of the great mess of dialect Wikipedias. I'm not too sure about this compromise yet.
If there're clear (algoritmic) rules for that, it can be done. See at http://zh.wikipedia.org/ how it can be viewed on seven! different variants.
Platonides wrote:
Mohamed Magdy wrote:
- I think it would be doable to make a tab that Egyptianizes (or any other
dialect) the Arabic article, that is, if we have some sort of conversion memory, that is if the dialect is stable (or standard), the dialect differs from a place to another, from a muhafazah to another ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhafazah). if anyone knows the technical method we could make a trial instead of the great mess of dialect Wikipedias. I'm not too sure about this compromise yet.
If there're clear (algoritmic) rules for that, it can be done. See at http://zh.wikipedia.org/ how it can be viewed on seven! different variants.
The Chinese variants just use conversion tables, not an algorithm. That's the only kind of conversion that can be done by the current software.
If literacy is the aim of this Egyptian Arabic project, then perhaps a useful first step would be to implement a de-vocalising filter. That should be possible with the current software. Then, with the filter on by default, editors can add vocalic marking in the edit box without annoying too many people. That's the approach that seems to be indicated by pages 7-12 of this paper:
http://papers.ldc.upenn.edu/EALL/ArabicLiteracy.pdf
Like zh-min-nan, we'd probably be accused of encouraging baby-talk, but if the community was behind it then it could go ahead.
-- Tim Starling
(This message is not an official message from the subcommittee, just myself as a member.)
Hello Mohamed Magdy,
As a member of the language subcommittee, I am sorry you are disappointed with our performance, but it is not true that its members do not care.
The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was approved with insufficient subcommittee discussion, which sparked some changes inside the subcommittee. For example, we replaced several inactive members to increase participation, and there is an upcoming proposal for a quorum to ensure that no other decision can be made without community consensus.
Subcommittee discussion is publicly archived (except comments by 2 members), as you can see in these relevant discussions:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-11#Subcom... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-12#Wiktio...
I am also sorry we are seen as unfair; I have tried to ensure a universal, objective policy that treats all requests equally. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
As for dissolving the subcommittee and recreating it with a different membership, I would not be opposed.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Jesse Plamondon-Willard pathoschild@gmail.com wrote:
...and there is an upcoming proposal for a quorum to ensure that no other decision can be made without community consensus.
(That should be "subcommittee consensus", of course.)
I was against the idea of creating a Masry Wikipedia (there is a looong thread where I brought it up here), *However* I am against deleting any Wikipedia that has been created and picked up an active community, regardless of how controversial it is. It is simply unfair to the people who have invested their time in the 300 something articles it has now. I think that is the correct thing to do despite the volume of complaints from people we are recieving on ar.wp and OTRS.
That said, I am personally taking issue with LangCom.
- Gerard has been the *only* person from LangCom that I have seen reply to any of the issues, his replies are selective, he refuses to answer whatever he doesnt think is relevant to his argument and is in general very aggressive, If the guys at LangCom chose him as the public face, I would say they were looking to pick fights rather than communicate decisions. - I Have asked several times about the delibration process and how the tons of arguments given on the controversial Masry topic were considered, I one time got an answer that was simply 'Can't disclose the arguments because of privacy issues of committee members' and the other was 'There was no arguments, I asked on the mailing list if I can create it and no one said no'. Both answers suggest an either disengaged committee or one that doesnt think transparency of the decision process is important, but rather, secretive decision is better. - After looking on the meta page for the committee, I asked if the committee has any mechanism for determining inactive members, if the process of decision is 'I sent an email and no one objected', that may mean approval, but it also may mean that people are not active. I got no answer for the question but Immediately after Masry controversy, two committee members resigned and one was removed for inactivity without any explanation given, is that an acknowledgement that the committee was malfunctioning? Why wasnt there some kind of public explaination.
2009/1/10 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com:
- Gerard has been the *only* person from LangCom that I have seen reply
to any of the issues, his replies are selective, he refuses to answer whatever he doesnt think is relevant to his argument and is in general very aggressive, If the guys at LangCom chose him as the public face, I would say they were looking to pick fights rather than communicate decisions.
Seconded, particularly the aggression.
- d.
I don´t think this is very fair. You can call Gerard a lot, but not really agressive... He can be very enthusiast, committed, and very sure he is right, and trying to persuade others, but agressive?
Anyway, I don't think a mailinglist (especially not this one) is a good place to discuss *people* rather then subjects. Have you tried to discuss your problems directly with Gerard, Muhammad and David? Sometimes that helps.
Best regards,
Lodewijk
2009/1/10 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
2009/1/10 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com:
- Gerard has been the *only* person from LangCom that I have seen reply
to any of the issues, his replies are selective, he refuses to answer whatever he doesnt think is relevant to his argument and is in general
very
aggressive, If the guys at LangCom chose him as the public face, I
would say
they were looking to pick fights rather than communicate decisions.
Seconded, particularly the aggression.
- d.
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I personally do not care about the nature of Gerard's character, he may be a very nice person if I meet him in person ( next Wikimania maybe). I am just refering to the way he conducted himself during the discussions on languages. And yes, I strongly believe this was aggressive. I won't get into such details but you can read the other thread.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 2:38 PM, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.comwrote:
I don´t think this is very fair. You can call Gerard a lot, but not really agressive... He can be very enthusiast, committed, and very sure he is right, and trying to persuade others, but agressive?
Anyway, I don't think a mailinglist (especially not this one) is a good place to discuss *people* rather then subjects. Have you tried to discuss your problems directly with Gerard, Muhammad and David? Sometimes that helps.
Best regards,
Lodewijk
2009/1/10 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
2009/1/10 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com:
- Gerard has been the *only* person from LangCom that I have seen
reply
to any of the issues, his replies are selective, he refuses to answer whatever he doesnt think is relevant to his argument and is in
general
very
aggressive, If the guys at LangCom chose him as the public face, I
would say
they were looking to pick fights rather than communicate decisions.
Seconded, particularly the aggression.
- d.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
- Gerard has been the *only* person from LangCom that I have seen reply
to any of the issues, his replies are selective, he refuses to answer whatever he doesnt think is relevant to his argument and is in general very aggressive, If the guys at LangCom chose him as the public face, I would say they were looking to pick fights rather than communicate decisions.
Gerard is definitely not a subcommittee spokesperson. Every word he and I speak are as individual members, speaking our own opinions. Discussion with the subcommittee should be done on the mailing list or on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Language_subcommittee, where I for example frequently respond.
Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
- After looking on the meta page for the committee, I asked if the
committee has any mechanism for determining inactive members, if the process of decision is 'I sent an email and no one objected', that may mean approval, but it also may mean that people are not active. I got no answer for the question but Immediately after Masry controversy, two committee members resigned and one was removed for inactivity without any explanation given, is that an acknowledgement that the committee was malfunctioning? Why wasnt there some kind of public explaination.
The members resigned or were removed at my proposal, one of several changes to ensure the problem you mentioned did not occur again. There are no language subcommittee announcements, but this and other decisions can be understood by reading the public archives: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-11#Remove_inactive_members.
Hi Jesse,
Thank you for the links, the last time I asked to look at those I was told the whole mailing list was private and not open to the public, I think opening this up is a huge step forward towards transparency.
I appreciate also your clarification about Gerard, I would have appreciated him making that clear in the discussions that happened.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 2:37 PM, Jesse Plamondon-Willard < pathoschild@gmail.com> wrote:
Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
- Gerard has been the *only* person from LangCom that I have seen reply
to any of the issues, his replies are selective, he refuses to answer whatever he doesnt think is relevant to his argument and is in general
very
aggressive, If the guys at LangCom chose him as the public face, I
would say
they were looking to pick fights rather than communicate decisions.
Gerard is definitely not a subcommittee spokesperson. Every word he and I speak are as individual members, speaking our own opinions. Discussion with the subcommittee should be done on the mailing list or on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Language_subcommittee, where I for example frequently respond.
Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
- After looking on the meta page for the committee, I asked if the
committee has any mechanism for determining inactive members, if the
process
of decision is 'I sent an email and no one objected', that may mean approval, but it also may mean that people are not active. I got no
answer
for the question but Immediately after Masry controversy, two committee members resigned and one was removed for inactivity without any
explanation
given, is that an acknowledgement that the committee was
malfunctioning? Why
wasnt there some kind of public explaination.
The members resigned or were removed at my proposal, one of several changes to ensure the problem you mentioned did not occur again. There are no language subcommittee announcements, but this and other decisions can be understood by reading the public archives: < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-11#Remove...
.
-- Yours cordially, Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
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On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
Thank you for the links, the last time I asked to look at those I was told the whole mailing list was private and not open to the public, I think opening this up is a huge step forward towards transparency.
Whoever told you that was misinformed or it was a misunderstanding. There has been semi-public archives for a long time: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_subcommittee/Archives&oldid=553592
So Based on the the Archives Jesse and Casey graciously provided the link to, the only discussion about Masry I found was:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-07#Wikipe...
When I raised the issue of Masry on this mailing list, raising what I thought was valid concerns, and at the same times others were raising such concerns on meta, Gerard's response was, and I quote:
I have indicated that the language
committee was unanimous in deciding that the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia request was eligible.
As indicated earlier, all members of the language
committee were explicitly asked to consider the issue that you raise. The consequence of this is that in my opinion you refuse people the freedom to work on a project in their language, languages that are eligible under the language policy of the WMF.
Per above link, I see a discussion only between two members (Gerard and Jon). I am pretty confused how did that constitute a 'unanimous decision'. Wouldn't that be a gross mis-characterization?
Wouldn't refusal to point me to archived discussion *then* mis-characterizing what really happened on the list be grounds for some kind of audit?
Forgive me If I am wrong, but that is the only information I have to work on, if I am wrong, I apologize to Gerard.
Best Regards, Muhammad Alsebaey
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
So Based on the the Archives Jesse and Casey graciously provided the link to, the only discussion about Masry I found was:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-07#Wikipe...
Yes, there was no discussion about approving the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia before its creation. That is the reason for the various changes that occurred (and are occurring) after the wiki was created, to ensure this never happens again.
Hoi, As I have been saying before, the language committee works on the basis that if only one person objects, something does not move forward. Many subjects are raised on our mailing list where people are notified that something is going to be done and when nobody objects within a certain time frame, the proposal is moved forward. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
So Based on the the Archives Jesse and Casey graciously provided the link to, the only discussion about Masry I found was:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-07#Wikipe...
When I raised the issue of Masry on this mailing list, raising what I thought was valid concerns, and at the same times others were raising such concerns on meta, Gerard's response was, and I quote:
I have indicated that the language
committee was unanimous in deciding that the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia request was eligible.
As indicated earlier, all members of the language
committee were explicitly asked to consider the issue that you raise. The consequence of this is that in my opinion you refuse people the freedom
to
work on a project in their language, languages that are eligible under
the
language policy of the WMF.
Per above link, I see a discussion only between two members (Gerard and Jon). I am pretty confused how did that constitute a 'unanimous decision'. Wouldn't that be a gross mis-characterization?
Wouldn't refusal to point me to archived discussion *then* mis-characterizing what really happened on the list be grounds for some kind of audit?
Forgive me If I am wrong, but that is the only information I have to work on, if I am wrong, I apologize to Gerard.
Best Regards, Muhammad Alsebaey _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Which creates the situation we are in, according to you, all members of the language committee were explicitly asked to consider the issues that I and others raised, but since only one out of the 10+ people responded, therefore they must have all considered all the issues and have no comment, and the decision is unanimous. I am not going to debate with you how this doesnt sound very logical, It is sufficient to say you are now finding out that there were at least 1 objecting and 4 inactive members after you declared the decision 'unanimous'.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, As I have been saying before, the language committee works on the basis that if only one person objects, something does not move forward. Many subjects are raised on our mailing list where people are notified that something is going to be done and when nobody objects within a certain time frame, the proposal is moved forward. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
So Based on the the Archives Jesse and Casey graciously provided the link to, the only discussion about Masry I found was:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-07#Wikipe...
When I raised the issue of Masry on this mailing list, raising what I thought was valid concerns, and at the same times others were raising
such
concerns on meta, Gerard's response was, and I quote:
I have indicated that the language
committee was unanimous in deciding that the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia request was eligible.
As indicated earlier, all members of the language
committee were explicitly asked to consider the issue that you raise.
The
consequence of this is that in my opinion you refuse people the freedom
to
work on a project in their language, languages that are eligible under
the
language policy of the WMF.
Per above link, I see a discussion only between two members (Gerard and Jon). I am pretty confused how did that constitute a 'unanimous
decision'.
Wouldn't that be a gross mis-characterization?
Wouldn't refusal to point me to archived discussion *then* mis-characterizing what really happened on the list be grounds for some kind of audit?
Forgive me If I am wrong, but that is the only information I have to work on, if I am wrong, I apologize to Gerard.
Best Regards, Muhammad Alsebaey _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Hoi, You are wrong. If one person had objected at the time, the proposal would not have been made eligible. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
Which creates the situation we are in, according to you, all members of the language committee were explicitly asked to consider the issues that I and others raised, but since only one out of the 10+ people responded, therefore they must have all considered all the issues and have no comment, and the decision is unanimous. I am not going to debate with you how this doesnt sound very logical, It is sufficient to say you are now finding out that there were at least 1 objecting and 4 inactive members after you declared the decision 'unanimous'.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, As I have been saying before, the language committee works on the basis that if only one person objects, something does not move forward. Many
subjects
are raised on our mailing list where people are notified that something
is
going to be done and when nobody objects within a certain time frame, the proposal is moved forward. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
So Based on the the Archives Jesse and Casey graciously provided the
link
to, the only discussion about Masry I found was:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-07#Wikipe...
When I raised the issue of Masry on this mailing list, raising what I thought was valid concerns, and at the same times others were raising
such
concerns on meta, Gerard's response was, and I quote:
I have indicated that the language
committee was unanimous in deciding that the Egyptian Arabic
Wikipedia
request was eligible.
As indicated earlier, all members of the language
committee were explicitly asked to consider the issue that you raise.
The
consequence of this is that in my opinion you refuse people the
freedom
to
work on a project in their language, languages that are eligible
under
the
language policy of the WMF.
Per above link, I see a discussion only between two members (Gerard and Jon). I am pretty confused how did that constitute a 'unanimous
decision'.
Wouldn't that be a gross mis-characterization?
Wouldn't refusal to point me to archived discussion *then* mis-characterizing what really happened on the list be grounds for some kind of audit?
Forgive me If I am wrong, but that is the only information I have to
work
on, if I am wrong, I apologize to Gerard.
Best Regards, Muhammad Alsebaey _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
-- Best Regards, Muhammad Alsebaey _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Do you have a set time limit for people to respond in? a week? a month? and what about the 4 inactive persons, how do you consider them inactive? what if you had 7 inactive members out of 10 at a time and didnt know it, would it still be a 'unanimous' decision?
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, You are wrong. If one person had objected at the time, the proposal would not have been made eligible. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
Which creates the situation we are in, according to you, all members of the language committee were explicitly asked to consider the issues that I
and
others raised, but since only one out of the 10+ people responded, therefore they must have all considered all the issues and have no comment, and the decision is unanimous. I am not going to debate with you how this doesnt sound very logical, It is sufficient to say you are now finding out that there were at least 1 objecting and 4 inactive members after you declared the decision 'unanimous'.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, As I have been saying before, the language committee works on the basis that if only one person objects, something does not move forward. Many
subjects
are raised on our mailing list where people are notified that something
is
going to be done and when nobody objects within a certain time frame,
the
proposal is moved forward. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
So Based on the the Archives Jesse and Casey graciously provided the
link
to, the only discussion about Masry I found was:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-07#Wikipe...
When I raised the issue of Masry on this mailing list, raising what I thought was valid concerns, and at the same times others were raising
such
concerns on meta, Gerard's response was, and I quote:
I have indicated that the language
committee was unanimous in deciding that the Egyptian Arabic
Wikipedia
request was eligible.
As indicated earlier, all members of the language
committee were explicitly asked to consider the issue that you
raise.
The
consequence of this is that in my opinion you refuse people the
freedom
to
work on a project in their language, languages that are eligible
under
the
language policy of the WMF.
Per above link, I see a discussion only between two members (Gerard
and
Jon). I am pretty confused how did that constitute a 'unanimous
decision'.
Wouldn't that be a gross mis-characterization?
Wouldn't refusal to point me to archived discussion *then* mis-characterizing what really happened on the list be grounds for
some
kind of audit?
Forgive me If I am wrong, but that is the only information I have to
work
on, if I am wrong, I apologize to Gerard.
Best Regards, Muhammad Alsebaey _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
-- Best Regards, Muhammad Alsebaey _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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Hoi, Typically the time period is a couple of days up to a week. Pathoschild has asked our least active members if they were still interested in being a member. He indicated that he was going to make proposals. I am still waiting for those. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
Do you have a set time limit for people to respond in? a week? a month? and what about the 4 inactive persons, how do you consider them inactive? what if you had 7 inactive members out of 10 at a time and didnt know it, would it still be a 'unanimous' decision?
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, You are wrong. If one person had objected at the time, the proposal would not have been made eligible. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
Which creates the situation we are in, according to you, all members
of
the language committee were explicitly asked to consider the issues that I
and
others raised, but since only one out of the 10+ people responded, therefore they must have all considered all the issues and have no comment, and
the
decision is unanimous. I am not going to debate with you how this
doesnt
sound very logical, It is sufficient to say you are now finding out
that
there were at least 1 objecting and 4 inactive members after you
declared
the decision 'unanimous'.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, As I have been saying before, the language committee works on the
basis
that if only one person objects, something does not move forward. Many
subjects
are raised on our mailing list where people are notified that
something
is
going to be done and when nobody objects within a certain time frame,
the
proposal is moved forward. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
So Based on the the Archives Jesse and Casey graciously provided
the
link
to, the only discussion about Masry I found was:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee/Archives/2008-07#Wikipe...
When I raised the issue of Masry on this mailing list, raising what
I
thought was valid concerns, and at the same times others were
raising
such
concerns on meta, Gerard's response was, and I quote:
I have indicated that the language
committee was unanimous in deciding that the Egyptian Arabic
Wikipedia
request was eligible.
As indicated earlier, all members of the language
committee were explicitly asked to consider the issue that you
raise.
The
consequence of this is that in my opinion you refuse people the
freedom
to
work on a project in their language, languages that are eligible
under
the
language policy of the WMF.
Per above link, I see a discussion only between two members (Gerard
and
Jon). I am pretty confused how did that constitute a 'unanimous
decision'.
Wouldn't that be a gross mis-characterization?
Wouldn't refusal to point me to archived discussion *then* mis-characterizing what really happened on the list be grounds for
some
kind of audit?
Forgive me If I am wrong, but that is the only information I have
to
work
on, if I am wrong, I apologize to Gerard.
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Mohamed Magdy wrote:
(I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!).
I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this was stupid.
It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me that the current process is widely regarded as being broken.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales hett schreven:
Mohamed Magdy wrote:
(I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!).
I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this was stupid.
It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me that the current process is widely regarded as being broken.
--Jimbo
I agree, that the current process of new language edition approval has major flaws and can be regarded as broken to some degree. And I will not take a definite stance in the matter of arz.Wikipedia.
But please be aware, that the question of whether or not language editions in language varieties widely regarded as "dialects" are "stupid", "useless" or "laughable" is highly POV. We European or American outsiders have few personal POV about the matter, but we don't know much about the real linguistic differences. Those who know about the differences, have very deep personal POVs. If we grow up in a specific society, we unconsciously internalize the prevalent POVs of that society at a very early age. It's hard to overcome those POVs.
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language." By the way: This "uniform nation" and "stupid language" thing is not a Arabian world only thing, that the Europeans got rid of by kicking Latin's ass. The whole repeats itself on lower levels. Look at French vs. Occitan. If you ask Sarkozy or the Parisiens, Occitan is a French dialect. As citizens of the French Republic they should speak French. Trying to establish Occitan as a language on par with French is trying to destroy the unite French nation. But from a linguistic POV Occitan is not very closely related to French. Not closer than to Catalan, Spanish or Italian. Catalan being the next example. The Spanish saw it as a Spanish dialect. But they couldn't manage to drum that "fact" into the Catalans and Catalan finally became a "recognized" language.
So if the Egyptian VIP laughs, he does not laugh a linguistic laughter, but a political laughter.
The emancipation of Arabic "dialects" could lead to the establishment of a Arabience language family like Latin fell apart in the Romance language family. And that's what many Arabs fear, just as the Latin monks didn't like the end of Latin. But the 'future' (that means contemporary) Italians and French and Portuguese live happily with the former vernaculars.
Allowing the Arab dialects to go this way is a highly political decision. Forbidding it would be too. So there is no way Wikimedia could avoid making a political stance. But from the POV of 'Freedom' we should allow. If we forbid that's a definite stance. If we allow, there are still two possible outcomes: Latin will fall or it stand strong and Vulgar will stay vulgar.
Marcus Buck
2009/1/11 Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
So, tell me... Which language do the egyptian newspapers use? In which language are the egyptian books written? Which language does Naguib Mahfus use in his books? Which language do the children learn at school? Which language do you use in a letter when you apply for a job?
greetings, elian
elisabeth bauer hett schreven:
2009/1/11 Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
So, tell me... Which language do the egyptian newspapers use? In which language are the egyptian books written? Which language does Naguib Mahfus use in his books? Which language do the children learn at school? Which language do you use in a letter when you apply for a job?
greetings, elian
The answer to all of this is: Standard Arabic. That's exactly what I was pointing at. There's a strong non-conscious POV forcing the people to use a language for writing, that is very different from their native language. What language do most Mari use, when writing to other Mari? Russian. Aymara will most likely use Spanish when writing to other Aymara. Does that mean, that Mari is a dialect of Russian and Aymara a dialect of Spanish? Of course not. But it's a symptom of a very deeply internalized feeling of inferiority. A feeling spurred by Russian and Spanish speakers feeling superiority over those uneducated non Spanish speakers and non Russian speakers.
A 13th century monk would have argued:
Which language do the Royal chronicles use? In which language is the Vulgata written? Which language does Francis of Assisi use in his books? Which language do the novices learn at monastery school? Which language do you use in a letter when you petition to the sovereign's court?
The use of Latin restricted knowledge to those who were educated in the monasteries. The dismissal of Latin was an act of emancipation for the speakers of the vernaculars. I do not know enough about Arabic to judge whether pushing the vernaculars would be an act of intellectual emancipation or an act of divide et impera.
If the idea of writing in the vernacular would be obviously ridiculous, nobody would do it. There are people who want to work on arz, so they must see some use in it. Maybe they are still wrong. We can only figure it out, if we allow them to try.
By the way: You mention schools. When schools became mandatory in the course of the 18th, 19th century, many people had humanistic and educational goals. But from the very beginning it was also a tool for the country's rulers to manipulate the brains of young people. To induce attachment to the king and to prepare boys to be good soldiers. To make the children loyal citizens. That's still valid today. Language is one measure of bending the pupils' mind (of bending all people's minds). By teaching the national language, that in many cases is different from the native language, you estalish a direct channel to the mind. This channel is in the sole occupancy of the authorities and there's no need to share it with other information transmitters, cause the native environment uses another language (at least that was true in the time, when schools became mandatory. Today there are more diverse information channels). Language is a tool of power. That's the reason, why VIPs are no good source for opinions about languages not supported by the powers in force. Somebody who is Very Important has to stay in touch with the powers in force to keep being important. Touching the balance of power by supporting languages other than the language of power is dangerous if you have to keep a status. The mission of the foundation is an educational one. So it would be better to ask the uneducated masses of Egypt, whether they feel a gain from a Wikipedia in their language or whether they stick with the "Latin" Wikipedia.
Marcus Buck
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 3:27 AM, Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
elisabeth bauer hett schreven:
2009/1/11 Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
So, tell me... Which language do the egyptian newspapers use? In which language are the egyptian books written? Which language does Naguib Mahfus use in his books? Which language do the children learn at school? Which language do you use in a letter when you apply for a job?
greetings, elian
The answer to all of this is: Standard Arabic. That's exactly what I was pointing at. There's a strong non-conscious POV forcing the people to use a language for writing, that is very different from their native language. What language do most Mari use, when writing to other Mari? Russian. Aymara will most likely use Spanish when writing to other Aymara. Does that mean, that Mari is a dialect of Russian and Aymara a dialect of Spanish? Of course not. But it's a symptom of a very deeply internalized feeling of inferiority. A feeling spurred by Russian and Spanish speakers feeling superiority over those uneducated non Spanish speakers and non Russian speakers.
A 13th century monk would have argued:
Which language do the Royal chronicles use? In which language is the Vulgata written? Which language does Francis of Assisi use in his books? Which language do the novices learn at monastery school? Which language do you use in a letter when you petition to the sovereign's court?
The use of Latin restricted knowledge to those who were educated in the monasteries. The dismissal of Latin was an act of emancipation for the speakers of the vernaculars. I do not know enough about Arabic to judge whether pushing the vernaculars would be an act of intellectual emancipation or an act of divide et impera.
If the idea of writing in the vernacular would be obviously ridiculous, nobody would do it. There are people who want to work on arz, so they must see some use in it. Maybe they are still wrong. We can only figure it out, if we allow them to try.
By the way: You mention schools. When schools became mandatory in the course of the 18th, 19th century, many people had humanistic and educational goals. But from the very beginning it was also a tool for the country's rulers to manipulate the brains of young people. To induce attachment to the king and to prepare boys to be good soldiers. To make the children loyal citizens. That's still valid today. Language is one measure of bending the pupils' mind (of bending all people's minds). By teaching the national language, that in many cases is different from the native language, you estalish a direct channel to the mind. This channel is in the sole occupancy of the authorities and there's no need to share it with other information transmitters, cause the native environment uses another language (at least that was true in the time, when schools became mandatory. Today there are more diverse information channels). Language is a tool of power. That's the reason, why VIPs are no good source for opinions about languages not supported by the powers in force. Somebody who is Very Important has to stay in touch with the powers in force to keep being important. Touching the balance of power by supporting languages other than the language of power is dangerous if you have to keep a status. The mission of the foundation is an educational one. So it would be better to ask the uneducated masses of Egypt, whether they feel a gain from a Wikipedia in their language or whether they stick with the "Latin" Wikipedia.
First of all, I may sign every Marcus' word in this and previous email.
There is one more issue which I mentioned in the previous iteration related to EA [Sports]. Having education in the native language is a very important cultural achievement. Instead between 1/4 and 1/5 of inhabitants who don't know to read and write you [Egyptians etc.] will have much better ratio. Besides examples which I gave the last time, here are two more: one of the poorest countries in Europe, Albania, with relative majority of Muslim inhabitants, has 98.7% of literate people; not so rich Azerbaijan (yes, it could be much richer) with 90%+ Muslim majority has 98.8% of literate people. This is something less than 1/100 of inhabitants who don't know to read and write. In both of countries Arabic is a language for religious purposes, while native languages are educational. More educated persons means more intellectual power, which gives more political influence. Power of European countries before the Renaissance was silly in comparison with China (which solved educational problems at other way, not applicable to phonographic writing systems) and civilizations under Chinese influence (like Mongols, Tatars and Turks were). Instead of opposing EA and similar projects, educated Egyptians (and other educated Arabs) should learn from European history (but, please, avoid the first half of 20th century!).
And about life and work of Gerard Meijssen... Along with Jesse, Gerard is the most responsible person for the fact that Language subcommittee is working. Before asking to remove him from the subcommittee, I would like to see a proposal for a member which would have comparably similar characteristics:
* A high level of enthusiasm for Wikimedian projects and involvement in them. * At least one significant project (cf. OmegaWiki). * At least 6 months of active work in Language subcommittee.
Otherwise, we may close the shop.
To be more precise, here are things which none of others would do:
* Implementing transparency by archiving emails at the public place. Along with other technical issues which make LangCom to look like the most regulated (sub)committee, this is done by Jesse and I can't imagine someone else who would do that. While I think that transparency and look and feel are important, for that kind of job I would have to be payed (actually, I wouldn't accept such job, even it is payed). * Raising attention around boring issues around languages by using variety of methods (blogging, writing projects, talking with a lot of people...). This is done by Gerard and I really can't imagine someone else at that position. Even I am 10 years or so younger than Gerard, I have a very small part of his energy. And he is interested in languages.
Both of them are doing those jobs for years. It is not about temporary enthusiasm.
At the other side, of course, I am one of not so big number of persons who has the honor to know very well how hard is to work with Gerard. But, his willingness to change some positions (slowly but surely) is good enough in conjunction with his other qualities. In other words, I would like to be able to fly, but I am not. I would like to see perfect persons at the right positions, but it is far from reality.
Out of the issue related to Gerard personally, I want to say that this objection (and the previous one) to Language subcommittee's work is the most articulated one. Because of that I think that we may have some benefits from it. For example, I would like to hear a generic solution for cases like EA is (here, at the list, or at Meta). Personally, I would like to see more articulated community's opinion toward issues related to languages.
Milos,
With all due respect to all the work Gerard has done, my issue with him is simple (should be apparent by now), he approved EA based on a mail exchange he had with only one committee member, painted that in a public email as a unanimous decision, and it turned out that 4 of his committee members were inactive at the time and at least one (I have not heard from the others yet) had at least some issues with the decision. I will be completely satisfied with a simple acknowledgment that the process was faulty, and that he is willing to work to rectify it for the future, as of now, I only see that he sees absolutely nothing wrong with what happened. I just want to see a clear path for that not to happen again in LangCom, I have been encouraged by Jesse's comments, but they still remain pretty much in contrast with the position Gerard maintains.
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 3:27 AM, Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
elisabeth bauer hett schreven:
2009/1/11 Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard
Arabic
is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of
use
to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs.
Standard
Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
So, tell me... Which language do the egyptian newspapers use? In which language are the egyptian books written? Which language does Naguib Mahfus use in his books? Which language do the children learn at school? Which language do you use in a letter when you apply for a job?
greetings, elian
The answer to all of this is: Standard Arabic. That's exactly what I was pointing at. There's a strong non-conscious POV forcing the people to use a language for writing, that is very different from their native language. What language do most Mari use, when writing to other Mari? Russian. Aymara will most likely use Spanish when writing to other Aymara. Does that mean, that Mari is a dialect of Russian and Aymara a dialect of Spanish? Of course not. But it's a symptom of a very deeply internalized feeling of inferiority. A feeling spurred by Russian and Spanish speakers feeling superiority over those uneducated non Spanish speakers and non Russian speakers.
A 13th century monk would have argued:
Which language do the Royal chronicles use? In which language is the Vulgata written? Which language does Francis of Assisi use in his books? Which language do the novices learn at monastery school? Which language do you use in a letter when you petition to the
sovereign's court?
The use of Latin restricted knowledge to those who were educated in the monasteries. The dismissal of Latin was an act of emancipation for the speakers of the vernaculars. I do not know enough about Arabic to judge whether pushing the vernaculars would be an act of intellectual emancipation or an act of divide et impera.
If the idea of writing in the vernacular would be obviously ridiculous, nobody would do it. There are people who want to work on arz, so they must see some use in it. Maybe they are still wrong. We can only figure it out, if we allow them to try.
By the way: You mention schools. When schools became mandatory in the course of the 18th, 19th century, many people had humanistic and educational goals. But from the very beginning it was also a tool for the country's rulers to manipulate the brains of young people. To induce attachment to the king and to prepare boys to be good soldiers. To make the children loyal citizens. That's still valid today. Language is one measure of bending the pupils' mind (of bending all people's minds). By teaching the national language, that in many cases is different from the native language, you estalish a direct channel to the mind. This channel is in the sole occupancy of the authorities and there's no need to share it with other information transmitters, cause the native environment uses another language (at least that was true in the time, when schools became mandatory. Today there are more diverse information channels). Language is a tool of power. That's the reason, why VIPs are no good source for opinions about languages not supported by the powers in force. Somebody who is Very Important has to stay in touch with the powers in force to keep being important. Touching the balance of power by supporting languages other than the language of power is dangerous if you have to keep a status. The mission of the foundation is an educational one. So it would be better to ask the uneducated masses of Egypt, whether they feel a gain from a Wikipedia in their language or whether they stick with the "Latin" Wikipedia.
First of all, I may sign every Marcus' word in this and previous email.
There is one more issue which I mentioned in the previous iteration related to EA [Sports]. Having education in the native language is a very important cultural achievement. Instead between 1/4 and 1/5 of inhabitants who don't know to read and write you [Egyptians etc.] will have much better ratio. Besides examples which I gave the last time, here are two more: one of the poorest countries in Europe, Albania, with relative majority of Muslim inhabitants, has 98.7% of literate people; not so rich Azerbaijan (yes, it could be much richer) with 90%+ Muslim majority has 98.8% of literate people. This is something less than 1/100 of inhabitants who don't know to read and write. In both of countries Arabic is a language for religious purposes, while native languages are educational. More educated persons means more intellectual power, which gives more political influence. Power of European countries before the Renaissance was silly in comparison with China (which solved educational problems at other way, not applicable to phonographic writing systems) and civilizations under Chinese influence (like Mongols, Tatars and Turks were). Instead of opposing EA and similar projects, educated Egyptians (and other educated Arabs) should learn from European history (but, please, avoid the first half of 20th century!).
And about life and work of Gerard Meijssen... Along with Jesse, Gerard is the most responsible person for the fact that Language subcommittee is working. Before asking to remove him from the subcommittee, I would like to see a proposal for a member which would have comparably similar characteristics:
- A high level of enthusiasm for Wikimedian projects and involvement in
them.
- At least one significant project (cf. OmegaWiki).
- At least 6 months of active work in Language subcommittee.
Otherwise, we may close the shop.
To be more precise, here are things which none of others would do:
- Implementing transparency by archiving emails at the public place.
Along with other technical issues which make LangCom to look like the most regulated (sub)committee, this is done by Jesse and I can't imagine someone else who would do that. While I think that transparency and look and feel are important, for that kind of job I would have to be payed (actually, I wouldn't accept such job, even it is payed).
- Raising attention around boring issues around languages by using
variety of methods (blogging, writing projects, talking with a lot of people...). This is done by Gerard and I really can't imagine someone else at that position. Even I am 10 years or so younger than Gerard, I have a very small part of his energy. And he is interested in languages.
Both of them are doing those jobs for years. It is not about temporary enthusiasm.
At the other side, of course, I am one of not so big number of persons who has the honor to know very well how hard is to work with Gerard. But, his willingness to change some positions (slowly but surely) is good enough in conjunction with his other qualities. In other words, I would like to be able to fly, but I am not. I would like to see perfect persons at the right positions, but it is far from reality.
Out of the issue related to Gerard personally, I want to say that this objection (and the previous one) to Language subcommittee's work is the most articulated one. Because of that I think that we may have some benefits from it. For example, I would like to hear a generic solution for cases like EA is (here, at the list, or at Meta). Personally, I would like to see more articulated community's opinion toward issues related to languages.
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On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 7:21 AM, Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
With all due respect to all the work Gerard has done, my issue with him is simple (should be apparent by now), he approved EA based on a mail exchange he had with only one committee member, painted that in a public email as a unanimous decision, and it turned out that 4 of his committee members were inactive at the time and at least one (I have not heard from the others yet) had at least some issues with the decision. I will be completely satisfied with a simple acknowledgment that the process was faulty, and that he is willing to work to rectify it for the future, as of now, I only see that he sees absolutely nothing wrong with what happened. I just want to see a clear path for that not to happen again in LangCom, I have been encouraged by Jesse's comments, but they still remain pretty much in contrast with the position Gerard maintains.
Two weeks ago or so Gerard (or someone else, I forgot) announced that Finnish Wikiversity passed. I didn't say anything around this issue because I don't see anything wrong with it. I could say "OK", "I am fine with it", but I felt it as fully redundant.
Less than a week ago someone from LangCom proposed closing the proposal of Southern Min in Hanji (this thread is not yet finished, so it is not archived) with reasoning that they may use conversion engine between Latin and Hanji. The other LangCom member agreed with that. But, Michael Everson and I disagreed with that. Simply, it is not possible to make a [simple] conversion engine between one phonographic and one logographic script. (Other issues may be discussed, but a possibility to solve it with a conversion engine is not a possibility.)
So, there are two conclusions: (1) I may imagine the process which had happened in relation to EA approval: no one made any serious objection and it passed. (2) There are two LangCom members introduced better in the linguistic issues, so the expertise level is raised and I think that it will be raised more in the future.
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
So, there are two conclusions: (1) I may imagine the process which had happened in relation to EA approval: no one made any serious objection and it passed. (2) There are two LangCom members introduced better in the linguistic issues, so the expertise level is raised and I think that it will be raised more in the future.
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
Hoi, The current policy is really objective; a request for a project will be honoured when it complies with a set of prerequisites.
- is the language recognised as a language in the ISO-639-3 - is the language sufficiently unique - is there a sufficiently large corpus in the incubator - is there a community of a sufficient size so that we can trust the community to do well - are the requirements for localisation met
When the notions of the main language group are to be considered the criteria for new projects become less objective. At this time the fights of what is a language are fought in the ISO. This is where people come up with what is considered a consensus on what languages exist. This consensus is not universally shared but the best that can be had.
When people talk about languages, they enter a field where many things are taken for granted that are absolutely not straight forward. A language like Limburgian does not have one formal orthography. It consists of many dialects and it morphs at its edges into what are arguably other dialects of other languages and yet we have a Limburgian Wikipedia that is doing pretty well. When you have a languages like English, a person from Newcastle and a person from the Bayou are unlikely to understand each other well if at all. Given that Geordie is not considered a language, we do not allow for a Geordie Wikipedia. The ISO-639-6 might recognise Geordie as a linguistic entity, the ISO-639-6 will recognise at least 25.000 linguistic entities but does that mean that we want to consider all of them for a Wikipedia ?
When you talk about the historical and cultural background of languages, you have to appreciate how that works out in our environment. When you look at the Wikipedias in extinct languages like Anglo Saxon and Gothic, the texts arguably do not reflect the language that is spoken in the days when they were living languages. Gothic was not written in the Latin script and fights about equivalent issues are being fought on the Anglo Saxon Wikipedia. It is easy to argue that these Wikipedias do not teach anything that helps understand the original texts in those languages. Are these the historical and cultural things you want to be considered ?
Marcus Buck mentioned that in the Arabic world the standard Arabic language is seen as an unifying force. This is very much a political statement. Given that the language policy explicitly states that political arguments are not taken in consideration, many if cultural, sociological and historical arguments are explicitly left out of the equation. An other recurring argument is that new wikipedias detract from the "original" Wikipedia. The people who make this argument insist on what *others *can and cannot do. When people want to work on Egyptian Arabic, why should they work on a Wikipedia that they do not consider their own?
When you talk about reasonable decisions, what is it that makes something reasonable? The fact that people like Mohamed consider Egyptian Arabic as ignorant makes clear their position, but is that reasonable ? The language committee has only a remit to help new languages move along, This was to prevent more dysfunctional projects, projects with no new articles, no community, projects asked for by people who think Wikipedia is like a stamp collection.
In the end there are two arguments that Mohamed has that have some validity; are there sufficiently knowledgeable people in the committee and do enough people consider issues with the process. We have already added new people and Pathoschild indicated that he is working on proposals for change. The current process is well structured, it is at the time of giving eligibility that the validity of a language is considered. It is at this time when there were no objections from within the committee. Thanks, GerardM
Only people who do make mistakes all others have a perfect record.
2009/1/11 Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
So, there are two conclusions: (1) I may imagine the process which had happened in relation to EA approval: no one made any serious objection and it passed. (2) There are two LangCom members introduced better in the linguistic issues, so the expertise level is raised and I think that it will be raised more in the future.
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
-- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html
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Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, The current policy is really objective; a request for a project will be honoured when it complies with a set of prerequisites.
- is the language recognised as a language in the ISO-639-3
- is the language sufficiently unique
- is there a sufficiently large corpus in the incubator
- is there a community of a sufficient size so that we can trust the
community to do well
- are the requirements for localisation met
Just to be clear, I think what you want to really say is that the criteria are mechanically applied. Of course the choice of criteria is a separate question and may or may not be objective. Even a completely mechanically applied set of criteria can (at least arguendo) be a subjective choice dependant on ideological biases even of very drastic kinds.
Just because the rules are the same for all, doesn't mean the rules aren't biased.
I am not making any more pointed comment on the policy as such, just clarifying the logical structure in the aid of further discussion.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
2009/1/11 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
When you talk about reasonable decisions, what is it that makes something reasonable? The fact that people like Mohamed consider Egyptian Arabic as ignorant makes clear their position, but is that reasonable ? The language committee has only a remit to help new languages move along, This was to prevent more dysfunctional projects, projects with no new articles, no community, projects asked for by people who think Wikipedia is like a stamp collection.
Do not expect me to answer such the question, as I am not defintely expert in Arabic language. A don't know if your decission about Egyptian Wikipedia was right or wrong. I am even not attacing you, as I am quite sure you are not an expert in this area as well. Hope, you know, you do not know everything :-) I just reapat again. This is just a good example of good question for real expert, which you do not take into account but simply ignore, which causes problems with LangComm we discuss now. It is impossible to avoid cultural, historical and political impact of decision like closing and opening Egyptian Wikipedia or Bellaruss Wikipedia, so they HAVE TO BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT, even if you do not like it.
If you do not have experts in arabic languages having good knowledge about cultural and historical issues in current LangComm - try to find them. I belive there are independent experts for example at arabic literature departments at good universities in US or UK, which you may trust, they are not connected with any side of the conflict and which might help you to avoid doing silly mistakes, by ignoring important cultural and historical issues. Any language is a result of longer or shorter social process, this is not just a technical problem.
Just an off topic, you do realize that me and the original poster of this thread are different people, right? I do ask because you kind of mixed our arguments in the last part of your post. The original poster probably has a more 'vivid' choice of words than I usually do :) .
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 4:45 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, The current policy is really objective; a request for a project will be honoured when it complies with a set of prerequisites.
- is the language recognised as a language in the ISO-639-3
- is the language sufficiently unique
- is there a sufficiently large corpus in the incubator
- is there a community of a sufficient size so that we can trust the
community to do well
- are the requirements for localisation met
When the notions of the main language group are to be considered the criteria for new projects become less objective. At this time the fights of what is a language are fought in the ISO. This is where people come up with what is considered a consensus on what languages exist. This consensus is not universally shared but the best that can be had.
When people talk about languages, they enter a field where many things are taken for granted that are absolutely not straight forward. A language like Limburgian does not have one formal orthography. It consists of many dialects and it morphs at its edges into what are arguably other dialects of other languages and yet we have a Limburgian Wikipedia that is doing pretty well. When you have a languages like English, a person from Newcastle and a person from the Bayou are unlikely to understand each other well if at all. Given that Geordie is not considered a language, we do not allow for a Geordie Wikipedia. The ISO-639-6 might recognise Geordie as a linguistic entity, the ISO-639-6 will recognise at least 25.000 linguistic entities but does that mean that we want to consider all of them for a Wikipedia ?
When you talk about the historical and cultural background of languages, you have to appreciate how that works out in our environment. When you look at the Wikipedias in extinct languages like Anglo Saxon and Gothic, the texts arguably do not reflect the language that is spoken in the days when they were living languages. Gothic was not written in the Latin script and fights about equivalent issues are being fought on the Anglo Saxon Wikipedia. It is easy to argue that these Wikipedias do not teach anything that helps understand the original texts in those languages. Are these the historical and cultural things you want to be considered ?
Marcus Buck mentioned that in the Arabic world the standard Arabic language is seen as an unifying force. This is very much a political statement. Given that the language policy explicitly states that political arguments are not taken in consideration, many if cultural, sociological and historical arguments are explicitly left out of the equation. An other recurring argument is that new wikipedias detract from the "original" Wikipedia. The people who make this argument insist on what *others *can and cannot do. When people want to work on Egyptian Arabic, why should they work on a Wikipedia that they do not consider their own?
When you talk about reasonable decisions, what is it that makes something reasonable? The fact that people like Mohamed consider Egyptian Arabic as ignorant makes clear their position, but is that reasonable ? The language committee has only a remit to help new languages move along, This was to prevent more dysfunctional projects, projects with no new articles, no community, projects asked for by people who think Wikipedia is like a stamp collection.
In the end there are two arguments that Mohamed has that have some validity; are there sufficiently knowledgeable people in the committee and do enough people consider issues with the process. We have already added new people and Pathoschild indicated that he is working on proposals for change. The current process is well structured, it is at the time of giving eligibility that the validity of a language is considered. It is at this time when there were no objections from within the committee. Thanks, GerardM
Only people who do make mistakes all others have a perfect record.
2009/1/11 Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
So, there are two conclusions: (1) I may imagine the process which had happened in relation to EA approval: no one made any serious objection and it passed. (2) There are two LangCom members introduced better in the linguistic issues, so the expertise level is raised and I think that it will be raised more in the future.
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
-- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html
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On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
Actually, it is a misunderstanding of Michael's knowledge. His expertise is, for example, making an orthography for a random language [without orthography]. In fact, we need exactly his kind of linguists. As I mentioned, we are working on raising expertise quality inside of LangCom.
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
Actually, it is a misunderstanding of Michael's knowledge. His expertise is, for example, making an orthography for a random language [without orthography]. In fact, we need exactly his kind of linguists. As I mentioned, we are working on raising expertise quality inside of LangCom.
And just to be more precise. After a couple of years of interacting with people in relation to Wikimedia projects, I realized that it is not so possible to get a random academician and put them into some Wikimedian working body. Usually, those persons are not so interested.
I see that we have two more options for finding persons with relevant level of expertise: * to find Wikimedians with this kind of expertise; or * that some interested academician contacts us.
The problem seems to be not the lack of a linguist's knowledge. We Wikimedians are not sure or unanimous about what to expect from a Wikipedia language edition, and what languages (language communities) we trust to conform to our expectations.
My thoughts about the questions discussed here:
- The language comittee could be organised differently, with more rules about communication and decision making and also majority rule instead of a veto for every member.
- I don't think that Gerard deserves the aggression I have noticed here.
- Wikipedia can not be a solution for all problems of the world. Language planning is difficult and includes also the implementation of a language (acquisition planning, status planning). I do not believe that creating an encyclopaedia should be at the beginning of this long way.
- Our present day rules for new proposals would outlaw language editions already existing and doing well, like Esperanto ("constructed"), Latin ("ancient") or Luxembourgish (dialect). It would be a pity if a Wikipedia language edition does not exist for the only reason that a rule prohibits it.
- Labeling languages and forbidding them is not a good point to start. It should not be said "this is a dialect, we don't want ist", but looked whether there is an actual linguistic community that already uses the language for purposes similar to Wikipedia (scientific, popularizing texts).
- And, as already said, the decisive point is what we expect from a Wikipedia. For some the Wikia of "Lingua Franca Nova" would have been a great Wikipedia, for others it shows that a Wikipedia in it would have been disappointing.
Ziko
P.S. Maybe I should go on with translating my handbook about multilingual Wikipedia to English.
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com
wrote:
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
Actually, it is a misunderstanding of Michael's knowledge. His expertise is, for example, making an orthography for a random language [without orthography]. In fact, we need exactly his kind of linguists. As I mentioned, we are working on raising expertise quality inside of LangCom.
And just to be more precise. After a couple of years of interacting with people in relation to Wikimedia projects, I realized that it is not so possible to get a random academician and put them into some Wikimedian working body. Usually, those persons are not so interested.
I see that we have two more options for finding persons with relevant level of expertise:
- to find Wikimedians with this kind of expertise; or
- that some interested academician contacts us.
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Luxembourgish has an ISO code, doesn't it? Why wouldn't it be allowed?
Mark
2009/1/11 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com:
The problem seems to be not the lack of a linguist's knowledge. We Wikimedians are not sure or unanimous about what to expect from a Wikipedia language edition, and what languages (language communities) we trust to conform to our expectations.
My thoughts about the questions discussed here:
- The language comittee could be organised differently, with more rules
about communication and decision making and also majority rule instead of a veto for every member.
I don't think that Gerard deserves the aggression I have noticed here.
Wikipedia can not be a solution for all problems of the world. Language
planning is difficult and includes also the implementation of a language (acquisition planning, status planning). I do not believe that creating an encyclopaedia should be at the beginning of this long way.
- Our present day rules for new proposals would outlaw language editions
already existing and doing well, like Esperanto ("constructed"), Latin ("ancient") or Luxembourgish (dialect). It would be a pity if a Wikipedia language edition does not exist for the only reason that a rule prohibits it.
- Labeling languages and forbidding them is not a good point to start. It
should not be said "this is a dialect, we don't want ist", but looked whether there is an actual linguistic community that already uses the language for purposes similar to Wikipedia (scientific, popularizing texts).
- And, as already said, the decisive point is what we expect from a
Wikipedia. For some the Wikia of "Lingua Franca Nova" would have been a great Wikipedia, for others it shows that a Wikipedia in it would have been disappointing.
Ziko
P.S. Maybe I should go on with translating my handbook about multilingual Wikipedia to English.
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com
wrote:
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
Actually, it is a misunderstanding of Michael's knowledge. His expertise is, for example, making an orthography for a random language [without orthography]. In fact, we need exactly his kind of linguists. As I mentioned, we are working on raising expertise quality inside of LangCom.
And just to be more precise. After a couple of years of interacting with people in relation to Wikimedia projects, I realized that it is not so possible to get a random academician and put them into some Wikimedian working body. Usually, those persons are not so interested.
I see that we have two more options for finding persons with relevant level of expertise:
- to find Wikimedians with this kind of expertise; or
- that some interested academician contacts us.
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-- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
Actually, it is a misunderstanding of Michael's knowledge. His expertise is, for example, making an orthography for a random language [without orthography]. In fact, we need exactly his kind of linguists. As I mentioned, we are working on raising expertise quality inside of LangCom.
And just to be more precise. After a couple of years of interacting with people in relation to Wikimedia projects, I realized that it is not so possible to get a random academician and put them into some Wikimedian working body. Usually, those persons are not so interested.
I see that we have two more options for finding persons with relevant level of expertise:
- to find Wikimedians with this kind of expertise; or
- that some interested academician contacts us.
Well,
I did't want to come back to Belarus Wikipedia case, but at that time I have found quite easily 2 good experts. One from Univ. of Warsaw, vice-head o Belaruss literature department and one from Univ of Oxford (an emeritus professor, specializing in Belaruss politics and history). It wasn't very difficulit to ask them and get the answers - quite long and IMHO quite professional.I asked at that time if there is any interst for LangComm in reading this. The answer was "no", as at that time the decission was already taken, the situation was quite hot and arguments showing that the decission wasn't so clever were not listen simply by default. The stinky egg was already broken and members of LangComm were simply trying not to smell it :-)
I don't think that such kind of experts good in one case only should be members of LangComm. It probably doesn't make sense. But it does make sense to find them for specific purposes and then ask questions before making final decission. It can be done. Most of them give you an answer or at least point you to the places you can find it itself. LangComm should consist of the people who are clever enough to ask relevant questions and be able to understand and analyse the asnwers.
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
I did't want to come back to Belarus Wikipedia case, but at that time I have found quite easily 2 good experts. One from Univ. of Warsaw, vice-head o Belaruss literature department and one from Univ of Oxford (an emeritus professor, specializing in Belaruss politics and history). It wasn't very difficulit to ask them and get the answers - quite long and IMHO quite professional.I asked at that time if there is any interst for LangComm in reading this. The answer was "no", as at that time the decission was already taken, the situation was quite hot and arguments showing that the decission wasn't so clever were not listen simply by default. The stinky egg was already broken and members of LangComm were simply trying not to smell it :-)
I don't think that such kind of experts good in one case only should be members of LangComm. It probably doesn't make sense. But it does make sense to find them for specific purposes and then ask questions before making final decission. It can be done. Most of them give you an answer or at least point you to the places you can find it itself. LangComm should consist of the people who are clever enough to ask relevant questions and be able to understand and analyse the asnwers.
Yes, this is a good point. As far as I am introduced, this is LangCom's practice for a longer period of time. But, it is good to organize those contacts.
I also agree with your point related to LangCom members profile. But, it is also good to have in-house solution for regular issues (and we have it now).
Hoi, At the time there was a request for the STANDARD orthography of the Belarus language to be supported, The then be.wp community refused *any *content in that orthography with the argument that the current orthography is Stalinist and, that they reject it because of this. Given that Wikipedia is intended to be educational, it is important that it connects to people who are taught in the Belarus educational system. This makes the political and exclusive choice for the old orthography unacceptable.
We only accept one Wikipedia for one language. The fact that we still have what is called the be-tarask.wikipedia.org is only because people were of the opinion that we should retain the work that was done. Now I wonder what more experts could add to this.
This does however not mean that the be-tarask.wp is a bad project. There are other projects that are way more problematic. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/12 Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com
wrote:
Well, I think there should be not only computer-linguists experts like Evertype in LangCom, but you desperately need people who have good knowledge about culture, sociology and history of the main language groups, or at least you should be ready to ask relevant outside experts. I have a feeling that current LangCom completely ignores historical and cultural background related to language problems which is quite often a key to make resonable decissions.
Actually, it is a misunderstanding of Michael's knowledge. His expertise is, for example, making an orthography for a random language [without orthography]. In fact, we need exactly his kind of linguists. As I mentioned, we are working on raising expertise quality inside of LangCom.
And just to be more precise. After a couple of years of interacting with people in relation to Wikimedia projects, I realized that it is not so possible to get a random academician and put them into some Wikimedian working body. Usually, those persons are not so interested.
I see that we have two more options for finding persons with relevant level of expertise:
- to find Wikimedians with this kind of expertise; or
- that some interested academician contacts us.
Well,
I did't want to come back to Belarus Wikipedia case, but at that time I have found quite easily 2 good experts. One from Univ. of Warsaw, vice-head o Belaruss literature department and one from Univ of Oxford (an emeritus professor, specializing in Belaruss politics and history). It wasn't very difficulit to ask them and get the answers - quite long and IMHO quite professional.I asked at that time if there is any interst for LangComm in reading this. The answer was "no", as at that time the decission was already taken, the situation was quite hot and arguments showing that the decission wasn't so clever were not listen simply by default. The stinky egg was already broken and members of LangComm were simply trying not to smell it :-)
I don't think that such kind of experts good in one case only should be members of LangComm. It probably doesn't make sense. But it does make sense to find them for specific purposes and then ask questions before making final decission. It can be done. Most of them give you an answer or at least point you to the places you can find it itself. LangComm should consist of the people who are clever enough to ask relevant questions and be able to understand and analyse the asnwers.
-- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html
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2009/1/12 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
We only accept one Wikipedia for one language. The fact that we still have what is called the be-tarask.wikipedia.org is only because people were of the opinion that we should retain the work that was done. Now I wonder what more experts could add to this.
I am not an *expert* in Belarusian, but i know a little more about this language than the average Russian speaker does.
Both projects are OK. Both have several dedicated and caring people working on them. Both have certain problems. But their biggest problem is shared: the duplication of effort hurts them all.
Merging them will benefit Wikipedia as a whole and its Belarusian edition in particular and there should be free choice of orthography, as it is in the Wikipedias in English, Portuguese and Catalan.
Hoi, It is tragic to learn that the two Wikipedias cannot find it in themselves to cooperate. The two projects did not merge because at the time the position was taken that the standard orthography was not accepted. It would be really cool if a sense of sanity and friendship would prevail and have the two projects merge..
My question remains; what could an expert do more ?? In the end it is about what we accept in our projects and we do allow for this sad situation to persist Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/12 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com
2009/1/12 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
We only accept one Wikipedia for one language. The fact that we still
have
what is called the be-tarask.wikipedia.org is only because people were
of
the opinion that we should retain the work that was done. Now I wonder
what
more experts could add to this.
I am not an *expert* in Belarusian, but i know a little more about this language than the average Russian speaker does.
Both projects are OK. Both have several dedicated and caring people working on them. Both have certain problems. But their biggest problem is shared: the duplication of effort hurts them all.
Merging them will benefit Wikipedia as a whole and its Belarusian edition in particular and there should be free choice of orthography, as it is in the Wikipedias in English, Portuguese and Catalan.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni
heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com
"We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
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So, there are two conclusions: (1) I may imagine the process which had happened in relation to EA approval: no one made any serious objection and it passed. (2) There are two LangCom members introduced better in the linguistic issues, so the expertise level is raised and I think that it will be raised more in the future.
I find it hard to believe that the tons and tons of discussion on EA's proposal page didnt generate any comments from the committee except a brief conversation between Gerard and one member. That may mean that they were disengaged at the time or have not been given enough time to consider before the actual approval occured. Either way it points out a fault in the policy because both of which are practically undetectable in the current process. It is strange that we require a minimum number of people to participate in most of our actions (like admin elections for example) but approving a new wiki will occur with only a request and one reply.
Hoi, This is not that strange. The time span for discussion is brief. Discussion is relevant until the moment when it is decided that a language is eligible. When a language is eligible, the people who work on a proposal have to fulfill the rest of the requirements but do so in the understanding that their work will not be in vain. Most of the discussions about EA were from the time when the proposal had already been given the eligible status.
Most of the arguments used are the same arguments seen in other requests. People often feel really strongly about "their" language. The results are often quite ugly; for one language the choice of the official orthography makes you a Stalinist. The choice of an "official" orthography splits languages along the lines of borders. People writing their mother tongue are called dumb. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/11 Muhammad Alsebaey shipmaster@gmail.com
So, there are two conclusions: (1) I may imagine the process which had happened in relation to EA approval: no one made any serious objection and it passed. (2) There are two LangCom members introduced better in the linguistic issues, so the expertise level is raised and I think that it will be raised more in the future.
I find it hard to believe that the tons and tons of discussion on EA's proposal page didnt generate any comments from the committee except a brief conversation between Gerard and one member. That may mean that they were disengaged at the time or have not been given enough time to consider before the actual approval occured. Either way it points out a fault in the policy because both of which are practically undetectable in the current process. It is strange that we require a minimum number of people to participate in most of our actions (like admin elections for example) but approving a new wiki will occur with only a request and one reply.
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The mission of the foundation is an educational one. So it would be better to ask the uneducated masses of Egypt, whether they feel a gain from a Wikipedia in their language or whether they stick with the "Latin" Wikipedia.
Marcus Buck
It is interesting to me to see that Masri condones writing in a Latinized alphabet, I didnt know that until I saw Mohamed's email, so I went looking and they say you can write in both Arabic and 'latinized' characters. I said earlier that I am against deleting any project already opened with an active user base, still I fail to see how articles like the following are of any use to anybody but an elite few who would like to see their language more westernized, and are using Wikipedia to give ground to such experimentation... Do people actually think that the illiterate masses are willing to learn a totally new alphabet that is of no use to them in daily life just to read some information on Wikipedia? anyone else seeing this premise as kind of nonsensical?
http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85_%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8...)
http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%83%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%A7
Muhammad Alsebaey hett schreven:
The mission of the foundation is an educational one. So it would be better to ask the uneducated masses of Egypt, whether they feel a gain from a Wikipedia in their language or whether they stick with the "Latin" Wikipedia.
Marcus Buck
It is interesting to me to see that Masri condones writing in a Latinized alphabet, I didnt know that until I saw Mohamed's email, so I went looking and they say you can write in both Arabic and 'latinized' characters. I said earlier that I am against deleting any project already opened with an active user base, still I fail to see how articles like the following are of any use to anybody but an elite few who would like to see their language more westernized, and are using Wikipedia to give ground to such experimentation... Do people actually think that the illiterate masses are willing to learn a totally new alphabet that is of no use to them in daily life just to read some information on Wikipedia? anyone else seeing this premise as kind of nonsensical?
http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85_%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8...)
http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%83%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%A7
I don't know, how widespread knowledge of Latin letters is, but I'm quite sure, that you are right. Latin letters shouldn't be encouraged. I did some "random article" and in 36 random articles (that's a 10% sample of arz.Wikipedia) I found no article written in Latin letters. So I guess, articles in Latin letters are a very limited number. Both examples given by you were created by Dudi on the Incubator. It seems Dudi isn't active anymore, no edits since November. The account wasn't even recreated after the move from the Incubator to the wiki (but perhaps he chose another username). It seems, the problem is very limited.
Marcus Buck
hmm I didnt do an extensive search the first time around but I was looking at their writing guidelines and they say they encourage writing in either Latin or Arabic, which means that as of now, more articles are encouraged, and I think dudi is the admin MahmudMasri, who is still very active as I can see. I do agree though it is not widespread as I can only find few articles after another search, still, it is invited openly in their guidelines...
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 10:55 PM, Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
Muhammad Alsebaey hett schreven:
The mission of the foundation is an educational one. So it would be better to ask the uneducated masses of Egypt, whether they feel a gain from a Wikipedia in their language or whether they stick with the "Latin" Wikipedia.
Marcus Buck
It is interesting to me to see that Masri condones writing in a Latinized alphabet, I didnt know that until I saw Mohamed's email, so I went
looking
and they say you can write in both Arabic and 'latinized' characters. I
said
earlier that I am against deleting any project already opened with an
active
user base, still I fail to see how articles like the following are of any use to anybody but an elite few who would like to see their language more westernized, and are using Wikipedia to give ground to such experimentation... Do people actually think that the illiterate masses
are
willing to learn a totally new alphabet that is of no use to them in
daily
life just to read some information on Wikipedia? anyone else seeing this premise as kind of nonsensical?
http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85_%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8...)http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85_%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A8%D8%AA%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%8A_%28%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A8%D8%AA%D9%88%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%8A%D8%A9%29
http://arz.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%83%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%A7
I don't know, how widespread knowledge of Latin letters is, but I'm quite sure, that you are right. Latin letters shouldn't be encouraged. I did some "random article" and in 36 random articles (that's a 10% sample of arz.Wikipedia) I found no article written in Latin letters. So I guess, articles in Latin letters are a very limited number. Both examples given by you were created by Dudi on the Incubator. It seems Dudi isn't active anymore, no edits since November. The account wasn't even recreated after the move from the Incubator to the wiki (but perhaps he chose another username). It seems, the problem is very limited.
Marcus Buck
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Marcus Buck wrote:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims?
-- Tim Starling
Some Arabic varieties are more different than others. I would support a Wikipedia in Derja, for example (Maghrebi Arabic).
Mark
2009/1/11 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
Marcus Buck wrote:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims?
-- Tim Starling
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(oops, should be "divergent")
2009/1/11 Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com:
Some Arabic varieties are more different than others. I would support a Wikipedia in Derja, for example (Maghrebi Arabic).
Mark
2009/1/11 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
Marcus Buck wrote:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims?
-- Tim Starling
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Tim Starling hett schreven:
Marcus Buck wrote:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims?
-- Tim Starling
There's no obvious or agreed-upon measure for the proximity of dialects or languages nor for identity attitudes. All findings are inherently vague. What did you hear conflicting things about? About the big differences and problems with mutual intelligibility of Arabic dialects or about the notion of "one Arabic nation"? Well, that Arabic has a wide variety of different dialects, is obvious, if we look at the basic facts. Arabic is spoken over an area that spans thousands of kilometers. Arabic spread from its central area in Arabia in the 7th century due to the spread of Islam. Since then the dialects developed different from the standard that didn't change much since then due to it's liturgical character (just like Latin). Latin was in vulgar use since about the 1st century. So Latin Vulgar had 2000 years to change and Arabic Vulgar only 1300 years. Therefore Latin Vulgar should be roughly 50% more diverse than Arabic Vulgar (Please put the emphasis on "roughly" cause language change is of course not linear). [English is spread over a very wide area too and does not show that much variation. But English spread from England only 400 years ago and most of the speakers shifted to English only in very recent times. So outside of England there are no real dialects (and even England is no country with a pronounced dialectal landscape). Therefore the whole subject of "dialects" is a very obscure thing to many speakers of English.] The notion of the "one Arabic nation" is even more vague. We have to keep in mind, that mentalities do not necessarily differentiate between different identity-building elements. Identity can be based on ethnicity, on language, on religion, on common history, on citizenship or on arbitrary mixtures of these aspects. The most important connecting element for people in the Middle East is religion. The Islam. The Islam connects them to people with entirely different languages too. But the Standard Arabic language is connected to the Islam also, cause it's the liturgical language of the Islam. Saying, that Arabic is a macrolanguage can easily touch religious feelings. That's irrational, but happens. So there are many different levels of identity and interconnections between those levels of identity. It's possible, that you talked to Egyptians and they said "those damned Syrians" or otherwise showed few "Panarabic loyalty". But that doesn't mean there is no common identity. I'm sure you will easily find New Yorkers saying "those damned New Jerseyians" or US Americans saying "those damned Canadians". It's normal to have animosities with the people you know best, your closest neighbors (cause there's few reason to be angry about people you have no contact to). But if it comes to identity or loyalty, New Yorkers and New Jerseyians, Americans and Canadians, and Egyptians and Syrians will stand close and stick together.
Marcus Buck
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 3:04 AM, Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
Tim Starling hett schreven:
Marcus Buck wrote:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims?
-- Tim Starling
There's no obvious or agreed-upon measure for the proximity of dialects or languages nor for identity attitudes. All findings are inherently vague. What did you hear conflicting things about? About the big differences and problems with mutual intelligibility of Arabic dialects or about the notion of "one Arabic nation"? Well, that Arabic has a wide variety of different dialects, is obvious, if we look at the basic facts. Arabic is spoken over an area that spans thousands of kilometers. Arabic spread from its central area in Arabia in the 7th century due to the spread of Islam. Since then the dialects developed different from the standard that didn't change much since then due to it's liturgical character (just like Latin). Latin was in vulgar use since about the 1st century. So Latin Vulgar had 2000 years to change and Arabic Vulgar only 1300 years. Therefore Latin Vulgar should be roughly 50% more diverse than Arabic Vulgar (Please put the emphasis on "roughly" cause language change is of course not linear). [English is spread over a very wide area too and does not show that much variation. But English spread from England only 400 years ago and most of the speakers shifted to English only in very recent times. So outside of England there are no real dialects (and even England is no country with a pronounced dialectal landscape). Therefore the whole subject of "dialects" is a very obscure thing to many speakers of English.] The notion of the "one Arabic nation" is even more vague. We have to keep in mind, that mentalities do not necessarily differentiate between different identity-building elements. Identity can be based on ethnicity, on language, on religion, on common history, on citizenship or on arbitrary mixtures of these aspects. The most important connecting element for people in the Middle East is religion. The Islam. The Islam connects them to people with entirely different languages too. But the Standard Arabic language is connected to the Islam also, cause it's the liturgical language of the Islam. Saying, that Arabic is a macrolanguage can easily touch religious feelings. That's irrational, but happens. So there are many different levels of identity and interconnections between those levels of identity. It's possible, that you talked to Egyptians and they said "those damned Syrians" or otherwise showed few "Panarabic loyalty". But that doesn't mean there is no common identity. I'm sure you will easily find New Yorkers saying "those damned New Jerseyians" or US Americans saying "those damned Canadians". It's normal to have animosities with the people you know best, your closest neighbors (cause there's few reason to be angry about people you have no contact to). But if it comes to identity or loyalty, New Yorkers and New Jerseyians, Americans and Canadians, and Egyptians and Syrians will stand close and stick together.
Just to add here Scots. English with ~1000 years of divergent development is considered now as a separate language. Also, there are significantly different English creoles, like Jamaican is. Scots, EA and French may be treated as well developed creoles with some convergent tendencies with Celtic (Scots), Egyptian (EA) and Celtic and Germanic (French) substratum.
Marcus Buck wrote:
Tim Starling hett schreven:
Marcus Buck wrote:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin. And the Egyptian VIP is like a 13th century monk. "Writing in the language of the people. How stupid... Latin is a godly language."
I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims?
-- Tim Starling
There's no obvious or agreed-upon measure for the proximity of dialects or languages nor for identity attitudes. All findings are inherently vague. What did you hear conflicting things about?
Specifically the nature of the difference between Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic.
About the big differences and problems with mutual intelligibility of Arabic dialects or about the notion of "one Arabic nation"? Well, that Arabic has a wide variety of different dialects, is obvious, if we look at the basic facts. Arabic is spoken over an area that spans thousands of kilometers. Arabic spread from its central area in Arabia in the 7th century due to the spread of Islam.
Arabic may have spread from Morocco to Malaysia, but Cairo is quite close to the Arabian peninsula, so I wonder if you're not overgeneralising.
An attendee at Wikimania 2008 compared the difference between Egyptian Arabic and Standard Arabic to the difference between written English and spoken English, or written and spoken French, which seems to me to be somewhat different to the difference between French and Latin. It is, of course, a matter of degree.
So Latin Vulgar had 2000 years to change and Arabic Vulgar only 1300 years. Therefore Latin Vulgar should be roughly 50% more diverse than Arabic Vulgar (Please put the emphasis on "roughly" cause language change is of course not linear).
I'm not really interested in your back-of-the-envelope calculations. I was hoping that you might have some more detailed study that you can point me to.
Quoting again:
There's no obvious or agreed-upon measure for the proximity of dialects or languages nor for identity attitudes. All findings are inherently vague.
You seem to be preparing the ground to dismiss any kind of study which contradicts your opinion. Linguistics might be hard work, and fraught with subjectivity, but that's no reason to dismiss the whole field out of hand.
-- Tim Starling
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Arabic may have spread from Morocco to Malaysia, but Cairo is quite close to the Arabian peninsula, so I wonder if you're not overgeneralising.
From: http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?menu=004&LangID=51
"Egyptian Arabic is distinguished by a larger vowel inventory than Classical Arabic, with four short vowels (plus epenthetic schwa) and six long vowels, compared to three short vowels and six long vowels in Classical Arabic. Consonantal changes have included the loss of interdental fricatives. Egyptian Arabic is also characterized by two regular phonological processes lacking in Standard Arabic. First, all long vowels become shortened in unstressed positions and before consonant clusters. And second, many instances of short i and u are dropped by a process known as high vowel deletion. For example, when the feminine suffix -a is added to the participle kaatib "having written (masc.)", the i is deleted, resulting in katba.
Like other varieties of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic derives the bulk of its vocabulary by applying a number of patterns or templates to a stock of consonantal roots. For example, from the triliteral root (three-consonant root) g-w-z with the basic meaning of "pair" is derived gooz "pair; husband", yiggawwiz "to get married", gawaaz "marriage", and migwiz "double". As an example of a template, the template maCCaC is used to derive many nouns referring to a place where an activity is done by substituting the C's in the template with the consonants of a triliteral root, such as: maktab "office" (a place where one writes) and maTbax "kitchen" (a place where one cooks).
Verbs occur in two aspects: the perfective and the imperfective. The perfective is usually translated as a past tense or present perfect. Its conjugational morphology consists entirely of suffixes, for example: katab "he wrote", katabit "she wrote", katabt "I wrote", katabna "we wrote". The plain imperfective form is used much like an infinitive or subjunctive, as yiktib "he writes" in biyHibb yiktib"he likes to write". The imperfective also serves as the basis for the present and future tenses with particles bi and Ha, as in biyiktib "he writes" and Hayiktib "he will write". The conjugational morphology of the imperfective employs both prefixes and suffixes.
For example, from the imperfective stem ktib we get yiktib "he writes", tiktib "she writes", and yiktibu "they write". The imperative is formed by leaving off the prefix of the imperfective. Verbs, and certain other elements, are usually negated by simultaneous use of the particles ma- and -š. Sometimes these particles are affixed to either side of the verb, as in the past tense makatabš "he didn't write", while in other cases, the particles combine to form the separate word miš "not" which occurs before the verb, as in the future miš Hayiktib "he won't write".
In addition to the direct object clitics found in Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic also has indirect object clitics which follow any direct object clitic but precede negative -š. For example, "he wrote" is katab, "he wrote it (fem.)" is katabha, "he wrote it to you" is katabhaalak, and finally "he didn't write it to you" is makatabhalakš.
As in Standard Arabic, nouns are either masculine or feminine, and either singular, dual, or plural, and plurals are either sound (regular) or broken (irregular) employing a suffix or broken (irregular) employing a different template, as described in the Arabic Overview. Broken plurals are not restricted to a small subset of the vocabulary and are frequently used even with loanwords having three or four consonants, such as the English loanword sikšin "section" > sakaašin"sections". Many adjectives also have broken plural forms.
Egyptian Arabic is much less averse to borrowing than Standard Arabic, and the sources from which it has borrowed reflects the influence that different peoples have had in Egypt over its history. Many borrowings remain from Coptic, a Cushitic language which has been dead for several centuries but which was the dominant language in Egypt when the Arabs first arrived. Borrowings from Coptic are concentrated in fields of activity for which were foreign to Peninsular Arabic culture, such as agriculture. Later borrowings came primarily from Greek, Italian, French, and English. Most new borrowings are from English.
Like other modern dialects, though unlike Standard Arabic, the predominant word order in Egyptian Arabic is Subject Verb Object (SVO)."
This is a lot. Not like difference between Hittite and English, but it is like differences between Old Church Slavonic and Serbian or between Latin and Italian.
Most of the grammatical features you cited are shared with Standard Arabic... that's not a list of differences, it's a general description of Egyptian Arabic with a couple of differences noted. Written in Arabic script, short vowels aren't distinguished most of the time, so that's irrelevant anyhow.
Mark
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Arabic may have spread from Morocco to Malaysia, but Cairo is quite close to the Arabian peninsula, so I wonder if you're not overgeneralising.
From: http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?menu=004&LangID=51
"Egyptian Arabic is distinguished by a larger vowel inventory than Classical Arabic, with four short vowels (plus epenthetic schwa) and six long vowels, compared to three short vowels and six long vowels in Classical Arabic. Consonantal changes have included the loss of interdental fricatives. Egyptian Arabic is also characterized by two regular phonological processes lacking in Standard Arabic. First, all long vowels become shortened in unstressed positions and before consonant clusters. And second, many instances of short i and u are dropped by a process known as high vowel deletion. For example, when the feminine suffix -a is added to the participle kaatib "having written (masc.)", the i is deleted, resulting in katba.
Like other varieties of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic derives the bulk of its vocabulary by applying a number of patterns or templates to a stock of consonantal roots. For example, from the triliteral root (three-consonant root) g-w-z with the basic meaning of "pair" is derived gooz "pair; husband", yiggawwiz "to get married", gawaaz "marriage", and migwiz "double". As an example of a template, the template maCCaC is used to derive many nouns referring to a place where an activity is done by substituting the C's in the template with the consonants of a triliteral root, such as: maktab "office" (a place where one writes) and maTbax "kitchen" (a place where one cooks).
Verbs occur in two aspects: the perfective and the imperfective. The perfective is usually translated as a past tense or present perfect. Its conjugational morphology consists entirely of suffixes, for example: katab "he wrote", katabit "she wrote", katabt "I wrote", katabna "we wrote". The plain imperfective form is used much like an infinitive or subjunctive, as yiktib "he writes" in biyHibb yiktib"he likes to write". The imperfective also serves as the basis for the present and future tenses with particles bi and Ha, as in biyiktib "he writes" and Hayiktib "he will write". The conjugational morphology of the imperfective employs both prefixes and suffixes.
For example, from the imperfective stem ktib we get yiktib "he writes", tiktib "she writes", and yiktibu "they write". The imperative is formed by leaving off the prefix of the imperfective. Verbs, and certain other elements, are usually negated by simultaneous use of the particles ma- and -š. Sometimes these particles are affixed to either side of the verb, as in the past tense makatabš "he didn't write", while in other cases, the particles combine to form the separate word miš "not" which occurs before the verb, as in the future miš Hayiktib "he won't write".
In addition to the direct object clitics found in Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic also has indirect object clitics which follow any direct object clitic but precede negative -š. For example, "he wrote" is katab, "he wrote it (fem.)" is katabha, "he wrote it to you" is katabhaalak, and finally "he didn't write it to you" is makatabhalakš.
As in Standard Arabic, nouns are either masculine or feminine, and either singular, dual, or plural, and plurals are either sound (regular) or broken (irregular) employing a suffix or broken (irregular) employing a different template, as described in the Arabic Overview. Broken plurals are not restricted to a small subset of the vocabulary and are frequently used even with loanwords having three or four consonants, such as the English loanword sikšin "section" > sakaašin"sections". Many adjectives also have broken plural forms.
Egyptian Arabic is much less averse to borrowing than Standard Arabic, and the sources from which it has borrowed reflects the influence that different peoples have had in Egypt over its history. Many borrowings remain from Coptic, a Cushitic language which has been dead for several centuries but which was the dominant language in Egypt when the Arabs first arrived. Borrowings from Coptic are concentrated in fields of activity for which were foreign to Peninsular Arabic culture, such as agriculture. Later borrowings came primarily from Greek, Italian, French, and English. Most new borrowings are from English.
Like other modern dialects, though unlike Standard Arabic, the predominant word order in Egyptian Arabic is Subject Verb Object (SVO)."
This is a lot. Not like difference between Hittite and English, but it is like differences between Old Church Slavonic and Serbian or between Latin and Italian.
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Mark Williamson wrote:
Most of the grammatical features you cited are shared with Standard Arabic... that's not a list of differences, it's a general description of Egyptian Arabic with a couple of differences noted. Written in Arabic script, short vowels aren't distinguished most of the time, so that's irrelevant anyhow.
That may be so, but the rest of the linked page, and some other pages on that site, did answer most of my questions. The fact that MSA exists as a spoken form, and that standard written Arabic is an accurate rendering of it, certainly puts to rest my comparison with historical spelling in English. Also the fact that it has a different word order (SVO vs VSO) suggests that characterising the differences as "spelling" is not accurate. The section on literacy was also relevant. So my thanks to Milos for pointing it out.
I think it sorts out most of the linguistic questions for me, so that just leaves the political ones, which as always are more complex and emotionally charged.
-- Tim Starling
The differences are certainly more than spelling, but there exists a continuum for a variety like Egyptian Arabic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-creole_speech_continuum
I don't know if it would be accurate to classify Egyptian Arabic as a creole, but such a continuum certainly exists AFAIK between the most basilectal, rural varieties and more urban varieties that are more influenced by education.
Word order in most regional varieties of Arabic is different from Classical Arabic.
As far as the differences between "written" Egyptian Arabic and fus'ha (standard), from what I have seen so far, much of arz.wp is written in a style that is easily intelligible with fus'ha for me at least, but then I've only studied the language for 4 semesters so I would defer that question to native speakers.
Mark
2009/1/11 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Most of the grammatical features you cited are shared with Standard Arabic... that's not a list of differences, it's a general description of Egyptian Arabic with a couple of differences noted. Written in Arabic script, short vowels aren't distinguished most of the time, so that's irrelevant anyhow.
That may be so, but the rest of the linked page, and some other pages on that site, did answer most of my questions. The fact that MSA exists as a spoken form, and that standard written Arabic is an accurate rendering of it, certainly puts to rest my comparison with historical spelling in English. Also the fact that it has a different word order (SVO vs VSO) suggests that characterising the differences as "spelling" is not accurate. The section on literacy was also relevant. So my thanks to Milos for pointing it out.
I think it sorts out most of the linguistic questions for me, so that just leaves the political ones, which as always are more complex and emotionally charged.
-- Tim Starling
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Marcus Buck wrote:
Tim Starling hett schreven:
Marcus Buck wrote:
In the Arabic world there's a prevalent POV, that Arabs form one nation united by the use of the Arabic language. But in reality Standard Arabic is something like Latin. With the difference, that Latin fell out of use to make place for the Romance languages. So Egyptian Arabic vs. Standard Arabic is like French vs. Latin.
I have heard this before, but I am not convinced, because I have heard conflicting things from Egyptian people. I don't suppose you have a credible reference where I can read more about this, and which supports these claims?
There's no obvious or agreed-upon measure for the proximity of dialects or languages nor for identity attitudes. All findings are inherently vague. What did you hear conflicting things about? About the big differences and problems with mutual intelligibility of Arabic dialects or about the notion of "one Arabic nation"?
As one attended Wikimania in Alexandria I found that Egyptians were quite proud to let it be known that they are not Arabs. The notion of "one Arabic nation" seems more like an imperial Saudi attitude.
Well, that Arabic has a wide variety of different dialects, is obvious, if we look at the basic facts. Arabic is spoken over an area that spans thousands of kilometers. Arabic spread from its central area in Arabia in the 7th century due to the spread of Islam.
Islam as a religion, or as a political force?
Since then the dialects developed different from the standard that didn't change much since then due to it's liturgical character (just like Latin). Latin was in vulgar use since about the 1st century. So Latin Vulgar had 2000 years to change and Arabic Vulgar only 1300 years. Therefore Latin Vulgar should be roughly 50% more diverse than Arabic Vulgar (Please put the emphasis on "roughly" cause language change is of course not linear).
In Egypt Latin only had about 700 years beginning in the first century BC, and even then it had to compete with Greek and Coptic. The introduction of Latin in Egypt was also more imperial than religious. Similarly the roots of Latin in Europe were with the Roman conquests. Ecclesiastical Latin only became a factor after the fall of the Roman Empire, and in more countries than the ones who now speak Romance languages. Islam succeeded in Turkey and Persia, yet these countries retained their languages. It could very well be that Islam conquered Egypt at a time of linguistic instability. In the rest of sparsely populated North Africa there wasn't much of a literate environment to put up any resistance. With all the foreign invaders wanting a piece of Egypt over the centuries, with the British meddling in Egyptian affairs as late as 1956, they deserve credit for their efforts to distill their own language from a very noisy background.
[English is spread over a very wide area too and does not show that much variation. But English spread from England only 400 years ago and most of the speakers shifted to English only in very recent times. So outside of England there are no real dialects (and even England is no country with a pronounced dialectal landscape). Therefore the whole subject of "dialects" is a very obscure thing to many speakers of English.]
Dialects don't need so much as 400 years to develop. In the US there can be remarkable differences between the way of speaking in the eastern and western parts of Tennessee. Ebonics is viewed by some as a separate language. In the some parts of the US the influence of Spanish causes a great deal of concern. In French visitors from France can find it difficult to understand some Québécois, and it is only 250 years since the Conquest.
The notion of the "one Arabic nation" is even more vague. We have to keep in mind, that mentalities do not necessarily differentiate between different identity-building elements. Identity can be based on ethnicity, on language, on religion, on common history, on citizenship or on arbitrary mixtures of these aspects. The most important connecting element for people in the Middle East is religion. The Islam. The Islam connects them to people with entirely different languages too. But the Standard Arabic language is connected to the Islam also, cause it's the liturgical language of the Islam. Saying, that Arabic is a macrolanguage can easily touch religious feelings. That's irrational, but happens. So there are many different levels of identity and interconnections between those levels of identity. It's possible, that you talked to Egyptians and they said "those damned Syrians" or otherwise showed few "Panarabic loyalty". But that doesn't mean there is no common identity.
What common identity? Just because both speak a form of Arabic, and both are predominantly Muslim doesn't stop them from being Egyptians and Syrians first.
I'm sure you will easily find New Yorkers saying "those damned New Jerseyians" or US Americans saying "those damned Canadians".
Canadians are more likely to say "those damned Americans." Americans are more likely to ignore us, which in many ways is a good thing.
It's normal to have animosities with the people you know best, your closest neighbors (cause there's few reason to be angry about people you have no contact to). But if it comes to identity or loyalty, New Yorkers and New Jerseyians, Americans and Canadians, and Egyptians and Syrians will stand close and stick together.
That's an outrageous assumption. Canadians who attend an international sporting event between Americans and any other country will most often cheer for the other country. Since 1959 Canada has never broken diplomatic relations with Cuba, and has not participated in the US adventures against Vietnam and Iraq.
Ec
Ray Saintonge hett schreven:
That's an outrageous assumption. Canadians who attend an international sporting event between Americans and any other country will most often cheer for the other country. Since 1959 Canada has never broken diplomatic relations with Cuba, and has not participated in the US adventures against Vietnam and Iraq.
Ec
Rivalry in sports is a good example of what I spoke of: animosities between neighbors. There can even be outspoken rivalries between neighboring villages or towns, although both places share every single value or custom or mentality. The mindset is identical and still they can be engaged in contention. But if their basic values or customs are threatened by a third party, they will forget their little animosities and stand side by side. Cuba is just a little Communist island off the coast of America. There's no reason for Canada to show aggression towards Cuba cause Cuba does not threaten anybody. If Cuba would threaten common values of the USA and Canada, Canada would join the USA in its anti-Cuban actions. But we are rapidly degressing from the topic...
Identity has layers. Some layers are very emotional, but still unimportant. Sports for example. People can get very hot about sports, but they won't fight wars about it (the Football War being no counter-example). Other layers seem to be less hot-blooded, cause they emerge only rarely, but they can be existential and thus lead to embittered enmities.
Marcus Buck
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
Ray Saintonge hett schreven:
That's an outrageous assumption. Canadians who attend an international sporting event between Americans and any other country will most often cheer for the other country. Since 1959 Canada has never broken diplomatic relations with Cuba, and has not participated in the US adventures against Vietnam and Iraq.
Ec
Rivalry in sports is a good example of what I spoke of: animosities between neighbors. There can even be outspoken rivalries between neighboring villages or towns, although both places share every single value or custom or mentality. The mindset is identical and still they can be engaged in contention. But if their basic values or customs are threatened by a third party, they will forget their little animosities
I must say, I find this a bit of a difficult claim to make just out of the air. What is your supporting evidence for US and Canada having "the same mindset" and "the same mentality", other than the mindset which both states also share with Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden etc.?
Michael
Michael Bimmler hett schreven:
I must say, I find this a bit of a difficult claim to make just out of the air. What is your supporting evidence for US and Canada having "the same mindset" and "the same mentality", other than the mindset which both states also share with Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden etc.?
Michael
I didn't state they have any particular shared mindset that sets them off from the countries you named.
Marcus Buck
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:08 AM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
Mohamed Magdy wrote:
(I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!).
I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this was stupid.
It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me that the current process is widely regarded as being broken.
Jimmy, just to remind you that people in one academic institution in Belgrade laughed when you mentioned Bosnian language in 2005. But, things are somewhat changed now.
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Jimmy, just to remind you that people in one academic institution in Belgrade laughed when you mentioned Bosnian language in 2005. But, things are somewhat changed now.
Not really. There is still little evidence that it is a language distinct from the rest of the Central-South Slavic diasystem.
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 2:46 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Jimmy, just to remind you that people in one academic institution in Belgrade laughed when you mentioned Bosnian language in 2005. But, things are somewhat changed now.
Not really. There is still little evidence that it is a language distinct from the rest of the Central-South Slavic diasystem.
1. If you are really interested in linguistic issues, please avoid folk linguistics. Try with Peter Trudgill's works [1].
2. I didn't express any kind of opinion related to outsiders. Or you want to tell me that you know better the cultural climate in Belgrade?
3. Besides two first issues, you completely missed the point. Those persons didn't laugh when Jimmy mentioned Serbian and Croatian, but they laughed when he mentioned Bosnian.
On Sunday 11 January 2009 01:18:55 Milos Rancic wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 12:08 AM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this was stupid.
It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me that the current process is widely regarded as being broken.
Jimmy, just to remind you that people in one academic institution in Belgrade laughed when you mentioned Bosnian language in 2005. But, things are somewhat changed now.
Milos, please don't misinterpret events. Jimbo did not quite mention Bosnian language in 2005, and actually that is exactly the reason people laughed. And, they haven't laguhed dismissively as said Egyptian VIP, but actually cheered.
As another historical note from Wikimania 2008 ...
In our session (of mine and Arria Belli) which focused on translation, a girl who seemed to be Arabic but not known to me from where she came asked me if there would be a possibility of āmmiyya Wikipedias. I don't know which āmmiyya she cared for and don't know if she has joined the Egyptian Arabic. But it could be a sign some literal people thought it serious ... despites of other folks' questionable attitude.
I am rather inclined to Alsebaey's position. If they think it the best aim they could achive, just give them a chance and blessings. It won't ruin other projects at worst, hopefully.
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com wrote:
Mohamed Magdy wrote:
(I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!).
I was sitting next to an Egyptian VIP in the front row when the announcement was made, and he laughed and indicated that he thought this was stupid.
It is not up to me to make any decisions nor have any particular opinion about Egyptian, but this is one of many data points that suggest to me that the current process is widely regarded as being broken.
--Jimbo
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My proposal:
1.- Have a set of simple rules approved by community.
2.- A langcom integrate enterly by lingüists.
C.m.l.
A month ago i propose thi (bellow), no body comment it. I think it contents reasonable arguments.
The community must the unique "Law-maker" organization.
The langcom must simply be a "Law-taker" organization.
C.m.l.
________________________________ From: Crazy Lover always_yours.forever@yahoo.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 9:20:06 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee
My proposal:
1.- Have a set of simple rules approved by community.
2.- A langcom integrate enterly by lingüists.
C.m.l.
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Hoi, This is a personal attack, an attack that is the result of discontent of the way in which the policy of the language committee has been implemented.
So let me show where Mohammed is wrong. First of all, the language committee is multiple people. Recently two high powered people were added to the language committee. They are Michael Everson, who is so much of an expert in this field that he rates his own Wikipedia article and Milos Rancic, a linguist and a steward of the WMF. It is also incorrect that I would be the only one "doing" things. The last request to the board for a Pontic Wikipedia was written by Pathoschild. With such people actively involved, the argument that I can force my will on them is ... a bit off.
Second, Mohammed is upset about one issue only. The existence of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia. Mohammed is on one side of a dispute. He is under the impression that I am on the other side of this. The people who are on the other side of his dispute are the people who requested the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia and who are making the most of their project.
At the time when the request for the arz.wp was made, I asked the members of the language committee if Egyptian Arabic was eligible. I got the reply that it should be because it is recognised as a separate language. Nobody objected to this and consequently the language was given the status of eligible. The reason why I consulted the other members of the committee was exactly because I foresaw people objecting forcefully. I have not been disappointed. I am disappointed by Pathoschild's assertion that there was not enough discussion, he should have spoken up at the time.
As far as the localisation for Egyptian Arabic is concerned, there is a request for an Egyptian Arabic Wiktionary and it is to fulfill the requirement for a secondary project that the localisation is doing so well.
Key in the current policy is that we have looked for objective criteria to base the policy on. Using the ISO-639-3 standard is at the basis of how languages are identified on the Internet. We publish our content on the Internet so it was an obvious choice. The procedure and the requirements are well published. It does not make everybody happy, including myself but it does its job.
I have discussed illiteracy at some point. It is a well established fact that learning to read and write is best done by learning to read and write in the mother tongue. I have been involved in the translation of a study about the use of SignWriting in Saudi Arabia that proved this point. There are many such studies, and they make it quite clear that a close connection between the written language and the spoken language improves literacy. When the basic reading and writing skills are learned, a second language is learned much easier and this has a lasting impact on the abilities of a student.
It may surprise you, but I have a long history of trying to achieve things for languages like the Arabic language. At some stage there was an opportunity to have the complete English language Wikipedia translated by a state of the art machine translaton engine. For all kinds of reasons this did not happen. One of the reasons was the availability of servers.
The Arabic Wikipedia is doing really well. It has a consistently excellent localisation, and it is growing nicely. If anything I am surprised that it is not bigger then it is. In the discussions about Egyptian Arabic, I have made the point repeatedly that the best way of proving the point that standard Arabic is superior is by making sure that the Arabic Wikipedia is indeed superior.
As to Latin script in the arz.wikipedia, that is news to me. If this existed while in the Incubator, the project would not have had approval. I am disappointed about this. If anything, this damages the project considerably.
Given that Egyptian Arabic is indeed a separate language, it is not feasible to do full justice to the language by using machine translation. Machine translation only work up to a point. One such tool that is likely to do a great job is called Apertium, this tool is particularly good at translating closely related languages, and I am sure that you agree that this applies... I would be happily surprised if a real effort is given in creating such a machine translation.
Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/10 Mohamed Magdy mohamed.m.k@gmail.com
Hi all,
I would like to propose the dismantling of the language committee and creating a new one (not including Gerard, of course).
Why? Because it is chronically malfunctioning. Manifested in: # Gerard is forcing all his opinion, anything else is going nowhere. # Other members don't really care and leave it, unfortunately for us, to Gerard.
Background: I read about how unfair the LangCom before but I didn't really care because it wasn't affecting a language I care about. Then came the dreadful proposal for a dialect Wikipedia in my dialect, Egyptian dialect. At first, I wasn't sure in the beginning if I should support it or not, then I became sure if this should happen, it shouldn't happen on a platform like Wikipedia (for many reasons laid out in detail in the proposal page). I don't care if Ghaly and company (the people who made the proposal) started that on an independent website (Wikia or on an own domain for their campaign) but on Wikimedia, we should do the right thing (I hope). The proposal was approved (Gerard requires that you have the relevant ISO code and everything from there could be done, he is a bit annoyed now becuase of all the current proposals for dialect Wikipedias which were brought up by the Egyptian dialect Wikipedia proposal) and the technical team had no option but to create the wiki because Gerard gave it his blessings and the foundation didn't say a word (I heard that people were happy at Wikimania (Florence?) because of that proposal but I fail to understand why the Egyptian people there didn't express their opinion about it (it was in Egypt :!).
Trivia (I like structure but..):
- Gerard is talking about how good the localization of the Egyptian
dialect, well, that is a natural thing when the localization is a matter of copy-pasting Arabic translation and converting it to a slang form or English words in Arabic (nothing wrong at all in that of course, we do it all the time, but we don't do it for the sake of looking hip (there is a certain language charisma we have in Egypt, that is, if you can speak English and mix English with Arabic to look cool. don't know if other countries have it), we do it only to introduce new words that we are unable to find their equivalent in Arabic (e.g. Acetylcysteine which is أسيتيل سيستئين in Arabic, basically English (latin) in Arabic).
- May be ISO is wrong: why people are taking ISO codes as absolute,
don't-discuss matter? in our case, we have 22 dialects of Arabic and the pathetic decision to call them languages of the supposedly "Macro" language Arabic, that is nonsense and it should be amended, not the blind (if not stupid) opinion of making all these sorts of dialectical projects ( http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ara). I tried to contact the ISO, they say to contact the local office in my country ( http://www.eos.org.eg), and as always, they have dead emails, don't know about the phone numbers, I'm not even sure that anyone there would listen to a word of mine, besides, I wish to see changes before my expiry date is due.
- Gerard have the false delusion of protecting the freedom of Egyptians and
taking us out of illiteracy into the light of knowledge by making a new Wikipedia in slang and dialect. well, you are *wrong*, you are doing quite the opposite and other people are helping you alas. hope you understand that someday.
- Wave of ignorance: a new wave of ignorance are upon us and I don't like
Wikipedia being part of it.
- Did you know that when I tell people about this new Wikipedia, the
consiperacy theory of the west dividing us is brought up? like it wasn't enough that the ar.wiki isn't appreciated because of the several issues we have. no, now we have another big issue created because of the carelessness of some people. arz.wiki is a regression, making people think of Wikipedia as an enemy is a regression.
- Did you know that what was rejected before, is being done on that
arz.wiki? I'm talking about Arabic in latin characters Wikipedia. they have no objections there if you write Arabic in latin (a big no no in ar.wiki or any another respectable venue). dialect writing/Arabic in latin writing is for fun only, nothing serious.
- They have a template on arz.wiki which is placed on articles copied from
ar.wiki that says ~"this article needs more egyptianizing" like the one on uncyclopedia "this article needs to be more uncyclopediac" or something like that (sorry for the lack of links).
- I think it would be doable to make a tab that Egyptianizes (or any other
dialect) the Arabic article, that is, if we have some sort of conversion memory, that is if the dialect is stable (or standard), the dialect differs from a place to another, from a muhafazah to another ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhafazah). if anyone knows the technical method we could make a trial instead of the great mess of dialect Wikipedias. I'm not too sure about this compromise yet.
So, to sum it up: # Dissolve the current committee and make a new one of people who care. # Make all the discussions of the committee public and allow community members to comment and the committee really reads what they have to say. # Make sure that Gerard isn't on the new committee. # Treat ISO codes flexibly, they could be amended, they could be ignored if appropriate. # Undo the arz.wiki.
Pardon the long email, but I had to say what I have on that important issue, may be the new year would bring something else besides massacres.
--alnokta _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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