Scríobh Mark Williamson:
>If the Britney Spears article said "×'ר×TÖ´×~× ×TÖ´ ספּ×Tִרס ×T×-
×Ö·
>[[פּ×ָפּ×.×oערע ×-×T×'ער×T×Y|פּ×ָפּ×.×oערע
×-×T×'ער]]" ("Britney Spears is a
>[[popular singer]]") with an actual article of at least stub quality
>at the "Popular Singer" page, it could reasonably be considered a
>substub, but even if there was no article at "Popular Singer" I
>probably wouldn'tve touched it, had it been an actual sentence.
It's funny Mark, I don't seem to remember you being elevated to such a
position where you could make authoritative judgements on what is a stub, a
substub, or whatever. Whatever would have been the problem with just
expanding the sub-sub-stub or whatever you believed it was to a good
article? You know, like we do on other, non-minority Wikipedias. Yet
again, both in your original infraction and your spamming of this list with
hostile defensive flames, you've totally overstepped the bounds of what is
commonly held to be acceptable behaviour here.
On another note, when the first post to this list informing of a problem on
a minority-language Wikipedia came up, was I the only one who thought
"Mark!", before I even opened it to have a read?
Regards,
- Craig Franklin
Anthere wrote:
>On the net, I found "Tumbuka is a Bantu language spoken in Zambia, Malawi & Tanzania. There are a total of nearly 700,000 speakers in Malawi, where it is spoken primarily in the northern part of the country. Within Zambia, about 450,000 speakers are located mostly on the eastern side of the country. The balance of the nearly 2,000,000 total speakers are in Tanzania. "
>
>
Well, Wikipedia is not an oral source, so the relevant figure is readers
rather than speakers. As far as I can tell from google, there are very
few readers of Tumbuka, because it is not taught in any schools in the
region---even those who speak Tumbuka at home read and write in a
different language. That makes the usefulness of a Tumbuka Wikipedia as
an information source potentially limited. Not that we shouldn't have
it, but it's not going to suddenly bring a wealth of information to
millions of people, because very few people can read the language.
-Mark
You are absolutely correct Mark, it probably wont make a huge difference :-) At least now.
But possibly in the future, wikipedia (and in this case wiktionary) can also become an oral resource with sound recording.
What it could make a huge difference with is little by little helping african people become active on the net, appropriating it through websites such as ours, also improving english articles on these cultures and countries (or any other languages they speak in their country). Tiny bits can make huge waves on day :-)
That would be far than enough for me to support it.
---------------------------------
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It's Christmas time, the time to give gifts to your significant other.
Now, being Wikipedians, Wikipedia is pretty much a significant other in
some ways. So, what gift(s) do you wish Wikipedia could have this
holiday season? Anything and everything is fair game - wish for
anything you want.
For example, I wish Wikipedia could have for Christmas...
... an automated VFD tabulator
... RSS/Atom syndication for watchlists
... en in UTF-8
... a print version of "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense"
... category redirects
(these do not represent my personal views, but just a way to get the
ball rolling)
Of course, there is that other question, what gifts can you give to
Wikipedia this holiday season? Me, I'd like to contribute to the
following:
* [[Churchill Bowl]]
* Any Wikipedia policy on episode lists of TV series
In a message dated 03/12/2004 01:16:02 Eastern Standard Time,
dinganie(a)yahoo.co.uk writes:
won't
bore you with Malawi politics but you get the idea.
Actually, we are looking forward to seeing the information about Malawi and
neighboring countries grow as a result of the addition of a Tumbuka Wikipedia.
Please add what you can to the English Wikipedia as well about this part of
the wolrd where, admittedly, our coverage is lacking.
Danny
I am for the introduction of Tumbuka as well. Let's hope one more person
joins so that we can make that magic number of five.
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On the net, I found "Tumbuka is a Bantu language spoken in Zambia, Malawi & Tanzania. There are a total of nearly 700,000 speakers in Malawi, where it is spoken primarily in the northern part of the country. Within Zambia, about 450,000 speakers are located mostly on the eastern side of the country. The balance of the nearly 2,000,000 total speakers are in Tanzania. "
Gerard is absolutely correct.
We do not *only* work to be *yet* another resource for those who already have actually too much access to information. We also work to become a resource for those who do not have much information.
Adding new languages is certainly a strain on developers. It certainly will be that this project will grow slowly (it would be wiser perhaps to work mostly on wiktionary rather than wikipedia to start with), but I do not think we should on purpose limit the existence of small projects on the motive there will be few editors to work on.
I think increasing the gap between those with information and those without is not in the spirit of what we are trying to do.
He, read this : http://www.timescommunity.com/site/tab1.cfm?newsid=13329958&BRD=2553&PAG=46…
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Hoi,
In a recent post I wrote the ISO-639 codes for Nyanja and Tswana. The
information although correct was not complete; they have both two and
three character codes within ISO-639.
Nyanja or chiChewa has ny and nya
Tswana has ts and tsn
For use within Wikimedia projects we always use the two character codes.
Thanks,
GerardM
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1201/p01s04-woam.htm
SANTIAGO, CHILE - It was 102 years old, boring, unpopular, and
basically, as economist Marta Lagos puts it, "a middle-of-the-road piece
of nothing."
Now, it's a phenomenon. Las Ultimas Noticias (LUN) - The Latest News -
is Chile's most widely read newspaper today, setting tongues wagging,
talk-show hosts chatting, celebrities and politicians denying, serious
folks wailing, and advertisers calling.
No, it's not a tabloid, insist the employees at the slightly shabby
downtown newsroom. Rather, they say, it's a revolution in journalism, a
reader-driven product that reflects the changing values and interests of
a postdictatorship public that grew up on a diet of establishment news
and now wants more. Or, as some say - because of the often low-brow
content - less.
This revolution has occurred, says the paper's publisher Augustine
Edwards, thanks to his decision to listen to "the people." Three years
ago, under Mr. Edwards's guidance, LUN installed a system whereby all
clicks onto its website (www.lun.com) were recorded for all in the
newsroom to see. Those clicks - and the changing tastes and desires they
represent - drive the entire print content of LUN. If a certain story
gets a lot of clicks, for example, that is a signal to Edwards and his
team that the story should be followed up, and similar ones should be
sought for the next day. If a story gets only a few clicks, it is
killed. The system offers a direct barometer of public opinion, much
like the TV rating system - but unique to print media.
Thanks to you all for the comments/suggestions/questions.
I'll try to address most of the queries/questions and maybe give a little bit more information.
The 2 million estimate is most definitely out of date and/or based only on those people that live in Tumbuka speaking regions. Tumbuka is the lingua franca of the North of Malawi, a region of almost 3 million people of whom over two thirds speak the language. My estimate is that at least a million people in Zambia speak the language and at least half a million of people from these areas residing elsewhere speak the language. So 3.5 million would be a very conservative estimate. There should be at the very least 5 thousand Tumbuka speakers in the US alone and am sure at least 10 of these would contribute something to the site.
In Tumbuka water is maji. Tumbuka, like most Banthu languages, is a phonetic language so ma is pronounced as in man and ji as in Jeep. In another Malawian language, chiChewa, it's madzi (dzi pronounced as in AIDS!) and in a language spoken in South Africa and Botswana, seTswana, it's Metsi ('tsi' as in Nazi - please forgive my choice of word here, I don't know any other word that has 'tsi' sound that I could have used).
Merry Charismas and Happy New Year is: Christmas yiweme na chaka chipya chiweme; there's no word for Christmas in Tumbuka so we use the English one but normally spell it differently (phonetically) but I prefer spelling 'borrowed' words the original way.
My estimate is that around 75% of the speakers of this language can read and write of which at the very least 10 thousand have internet access.
I have written a few friends of mine and I hope they will be interested in the project. By my estimate, at least five should join the group within the next 24 hours (I'm some optimist!)! I didn't actually know that there's an entry for Tumbuka (in English) on Wikipedia until I saw it on GerardM's email. Thanks for that. I'll definitely add a few items to that this coming weekend.
Once again, thanks to you all for your contributions.
Dinnette