"Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> schrieb:
> Yes, I agree that conlangs are the more serious problem than natural
> languages. However, I don't think that there should be no criteria at all
> for natural languages. The three criteria that Andre proposed - ISO 639-2,
> more than 50 archived documents, or more than 10,000 speakers - seem
> reasonable, and would probably kick out most obscure conlangs, while
> leaving in legitimate spoken tongues, and dead languages too, if there's a
> written record of them (not that I care at all about those, but in the
> interest of wikipeace ..).
Actually, I think these might be too inclusive when looking at dead
languages. While I am all for the Latin Wikipedia, and would not mind
a Sanskrit one, Hittite or Sumerian are another matter. Many dead
languages are only in passive use, and to exclude those, I would
like to restrict ourselves to those languages in which (new) documents
have been written within the last 50 years or so.
Andre Engels
I'm pretty sure Klingon and most other languages made for fictional universes
are copyrighted (or at least many of their creators claim copyright). Let's
call these 'fictional languages' in order not to confuse them with languages
like Esperanto which were made specifically for people to use them (and not
just made to make fictional races seem more real).
These links seem to confirm the copyright situation for Klingon at least:
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/002300.htmlhttp://higbee.cots.net/~holtej/klingon/faq.htm#2.12
I could not find anything about this on StarTrek.com though and it does seem a
bit dubious to copyright fictional words. But then, I'm not sure if we would
want to be in a postion to pay legal fees to test Paramount's purported claim
(not to mention all the lost effort in a Klingon encyclopedia if we decided to
just pull the plug).
Also, the word 'Klingon' is a Paramount trademark.
I'm also uncomfortable with people using Wikimedia resources and the very
significant promotional aspects of the Wikipedia name to construct their own
languages. Erik's comparison with micronations seems to be an apt one to me
(although I don't agree with his specific recommendations since they would
exclude dead and many moribund languages).
So, IMO, a language must exist independent of Wikipedia and not be hindered by
a claim of copyright before an encyclopedia is started in it.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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PyWikipediabot is a bot used for several functions in Wikipedia.
Most famous is probably the bot for working on Interwiki links.
See http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot/. This is a
report of changes and additions to the bot in the past week.
* imagetransfer.py is a new bot. Given a Wikipedia page, it
searches through interwiki links for images, and on request
of the user, uploads them to the user's home Wikipedia. It's
still in development, but it seems the serious bugs have gone.
It was created by Andre Engels, with help from Head, and based
on an existing bot by Rob Hooft.
* copy_table.py takes a table from one Wikipedia and puts it in
another, translating 'on the fly'. Programmed by head. It
currently can translate taxoboxes between English, French,
German and Dutch, and German city data from German to English
and Dutch
* If the interwiki-bot is given a hint without a page title, the
title of the original page is taken to be the hint.
* The hints 'main' and 'more' of the interwiki-bot have been
renamed to '10' and '20', and '30' has been added; each gives
approximately that number of the largest languages. Also the
hint cyril: (for all languages in Cyrillic writing) has been
added.
Current discussion:
We are looking for ways to improve the handling of problems in
interwiki.py where more than one link is found to one language.
Andre Engels
"Peter Gervai" <grin(a)tolna.net> schrieb:
> As a sidenote: Hungary have a population of 10,000,000 people (with speakers
> approximated around 15,000,000) and we have around 5 permanent active
> editors. (Though I expect that raise soon since there going to be some press
> activity.)
>
> I always wondered what can a wikipedia do supporting a language of, say,
> 100,000 people. Half an editor?
>
> I haven't checked what's about wikipedias with small speaker base after 3-6
> months, what activity they possess. I wonder.
It varies, but then, it also varies for some much larger languages (Marathi
with 65 million speakers has only 4 pages, for example). There's four
Wikipedia languages with less than 100.000 speakers, none of them getting
anywhere serious, however the fifth smallest language (Icelandic, 250.000
speakers) managed to get to a number of 9 Wikipedians (with 10 or more
logged-in edits), and is seriously trying to make something.
Wikipedia languages with less than 1 million speakers:
speakers Wikipedians pages
Manx 250 0 1
Nauruan 7.000 2 16
Maori 50.000 0 8
Scottish 60.000 1 14
Icelandic 250.000 9 209
Irish 260.000 3 62
Corsican 340.000 0 14
Occitan 350.000 7 493
Welsh 600.000 9 954
Basque 600.000 5 2319
Frisian 700.000 9 881
Andre Engels
The Toki Pona language was constructed by Sonja Kisa. Sonja Kisa is also
User:Sonjaaa and the primary instigator of the Toki Pona Wikipedia. Toki
Pona is not an officially recognized language anywhere. Now the Toki Pona
Wikipedia is effectively not an encyclopedia, but a language development
wiki for the TP language.
So, where do we stop? A few years ago I scribbled down the beginnings of
an artificial language somewhere. Can I have my own Wikipedia, too? Yeah,
it's not really complete, but I can develop it as I go along, right? There
are 133 Google hits on Sonja Kisa's name. There are 13,100 hits on my
name. Heck, there are only 894 hits on "Toki Pona" and Google thinks I
misspelled "Toki Ona" (whatever that is). I bet I could push an artificial
language I create to 5,000 hits within a couple of months.
I realize that Brion is a fan of languages, and since he sets up those
wikis he pretty much decides what is acceptable. Shouldn't those languages
undergo some basic public approval process first, though, so that we can
determine whether there is really any value in creating them? In my
opinion, Wikipedia should not be a promotional vehicle for other people's
pet projects.
To me, it matters not whether a language is artificial or whether it has
naturally developed over hundreds of years. It does matter, however, how
many speakers there are, and if we can realistically create a complete and
accurate encyclopedia with that number of speakers. I'd say a minimum of
10,000 active speakers is a requirement for creating an encyclopedia.
Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that requirement.
But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of
interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation
as a serious project. When a professional historian reads our article
about the Holocaust, and there's a "Klingon" link right next to Japanese,
that might be seriously off-putting. Especially if there's also Tolkien's
Elvish, and maybe some language from the Buck Rogers universe. I'm sure
the furries also have their own languages.
IMHO this puts us into a similar realm as the micronations, of which there
are also thousands. Creating Wikipedias for all these unused languages is
like formally acknowledging them. Furthermore, this will bleed into all
other Wikimedia projects.
I'd prefer it if these languages were developed on separate wikis, until
they have a meaningful number of active speakers. And I also think the
decision whether to start a particular language should be made by the
community.
Regards,
Erik
To be more complete, the vote is also about which syntax is most consistent
with existing syntax, is easy to expand and does not lead to confusion.
Arguments pro and contra are presented for each suggested solution. So
anyone interested can make an informed judgement. No technical skills
required.
Erik Zachte
Hi everyone,
I'm new at Wikipedia and I want to start a wiki in Upper Sorbian. Upper
Sorbian is one of the 2 Sorbian languages spoken in East Germany in the
Federal country of Saxony. The other Sorbian language (Lower Sorbian) si
spoken in the Federal country of Brandenburg. The name of the region
where both Sorbian languages are spoken is Lusatia. Uppe Sorbian is
spoken in Southern part of Lusatia called Upper Lusatia. Upper Sorbian
is spoken by ca. 40,000 people. You can already find some information
about the Sorbian language in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Sorbian_language
What I have to do? AFAIK there must be translated the file Language.php
and copied to LanguageHsb.php. This I've alread done and I wrapped the
LangageHsb.php into a zip archive languagehsb.zip that you can find on:
http://www.michalupo.de/wikipedia/languagehsb.zip
I hope it will work. Could anybody create the domain
http://hsb.wikipedia.org?
Thank you in advance and kind regards,
Michael Wolf
I'm sure there are more than 10 000 people who Latin too, but none of them
are using the Latin Wikipedia :) Fluency in Latin on la: ranges from maybe
one or two people who are Latin scholars, to people who don't know it at
all...added to this is the fact that we can't even communicate with each
other, because not everyone understands Latin to the same degree, and there
is no other common language for us because some people speak English, some
Dutch, some Greek, some Japanese, etc.
But I complain about this all the time, I should really stop it :)
Adam Bishop
>From: Peter Gervai <grin(a)tolna.net>
>Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
>To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Languages: crossing a border?
>Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 18:23:50 +0200
>
>On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 05:47:46PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
> > Does Latin meet that requirement? The aboriginal Sami minority in
>
>I'm sure there are more than 10000 people who knows latin. At least
every
>doctor in Hungary ought to. :)
>
> > If this is the problem, why not solve this problem. Split the
lists
> > in two or three different lists: Languages with more than 20K
articles
> > can be considered "useful" encyclopedias, languages with
1K-20K
> > articles can be listed as "developing" encyclopedias,
and languages
> > with less than 1K articles are "experimental".
>
>Allright. So I am going on with my bot to create year articles (let's
start
>with 3000), and create cities (~4500) and maybe country templates and
...
>and...
>
>Yep. We have ~600 articles, but they are _real_. Not templates. Not
>automatically created. I believe I can create around 10000 of those
without
>much thinking. So we can be "useful" in, say, I week. Progress
is fast
>nowadays, isn't it?
>
>(All I wanted to say: article count isn't god's way to rate us. Apart
from
>the problem that there ain't no god.)
>
>--grin
>
>ps: ...on the other hand the number of speakers of a language.... (much
>harder to boost artifically)
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>Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Some of us are flexible enough to live in communities where lines are
> never drawn. The passion that some people have for making rules
> probably drives more people away than our support for obscure languages.
Write this down and glue it to your screen.
Full support!
Denny