Welsh people don't all speak English: I used to work with people from north Wales who couldn't speak a word of it. They /only/ spoke Welsh. Unusual, perhaps, but it happens. -----Original Message----- From: wikimediauk-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: 30 September 2011 13:05 To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] A little wiki "hacking" On 30 September 2011 11:31, <iain.macdonald(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote: speak Indeed. Part of the issue there is that the number is diminishing so much that there aren't enough speakers left to really produce a good encyclopaedia (there's something like 60,000 global speakers). The problem is even more apparent when you realise that what speakers there are tend to be a lot older than our core contributing demographic. I'd be inclined to say that Scots isn't really a separate language and Scottish Gaelic is too small to ever be a successful project, so we shouldn't really worry about either. If there are speakers of either language that want to do something, the chapter can support them through microgrants. I wouldn't advise a proactive approach by the chapter. The main argument is that there is essentially no-one that speaks Scots or Scottish Gaelic that doesn't also speak fluent English. That means our efforts will have significantly more impact if we concentrate on English. (Welsh is substantially larger, so it might be worth reaching out to the Welsh community, even though they all speak English too.) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org

On 30 September 2011 13:04, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: The whole point is that encouraging minority language wikipedias helps revitalise the language. These wikipedias will never compete with enwp for completeness, but you only need a handful of good wikipedians who are fluent in the language to be able to produce a reasonable number of good quality articles, which can have a beneficial impact on increasing language acquisition amongst the young, which in turn will tend to increase the number of contributors in that language as time goes on. Andrew [[User:BabelStone]]

On 30 September 2011 13:19, Andrew West <andrewcwest(a)gmail.com> wrote: Revitalising languages isn't what we're here to do, though. We're here to provide free and open content/knowledge. Ideally, we do that in the user's own language, but only because that's the most use to the user not because we're trying to promote the language.

It is certainly the case that there is (European) money around these languages, indeed I have been trying to get the content of the European funded dictionaries released CC-By-... It is important to remember, though, as Thomas pointed out (and was pointed out by members of both Lang Com and WMF staff at Wikimania) that the aims of language revitalisers (or saviours), while closely allied with ours, are not identical.

On 30 Sep 2011, at 13:19, Andrew West wrote: I have to admit (from a completely personal viewpoint) that this sounds like a reason _not_ to support minority language Wikipedias. I personally much prefer the trend towards more people speaking a single language, or set of main languages, rather than encouraging more small niches of people speaking their own language. The former makes it a lot easier to communicate with more people on a global basis and hence gain more knowledge, whereas the latter does the complete opposite. For me, the key points are increasing the availability of knowledge for those that only understand that language; increasing the body of knowledge that's shared between multiple languages to make it easier to learn a more common language; and to preserve information & culture specific to that language (which, of course, would ideally also be translated to other languages). Mike

On Monday, October 3, 2011, Michael Peel wrote: The issue becomes slightly more philosophical: languages *are* a form of knowledge though. A simple argument: if I know how to express the statement "Snow is white" in English, I know one thing. If I know how to say it in German, I know two things. In either state though, when I use it, I'm still expressing only one fact about the world. Expressing the facts is a matter of primary importance: it is important to the misson of sharing the sum of all human knowledge that we tell people whether snow is white, but we should also be sharing the more implicit, linguistic knowledge. Basically: language is a component part of the "sum of all human knowledge", not just a means of expressing that knowledge. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/>