i want to find my language, it is vietnam but i don't know how to find this. could you show me, thank you.
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I fully agree with Chad. Speaking out against more wikipedias in fictional languages shouldn't be confused with speaking out against those languages in general. I mean, many of them certainly are products of great creativity and therefore have a value of their own.
But, a the end of the day, what is (or should be) an encyclopedia all about? My definition is: a _comprehensive_ source of information. Now I'm afraid neither Klingon nor Quenyan nor any other fictional language wikipedia will ever achieve that status. Matter of fact, I think even most International auxiliary language wikipedias which have been set up so far won't get there.
So after all, those fantasy language wikipedias would all end up being creative playgrounds for small circles of people. Which surely woundn't be a bad thing. But would that really fit into the concept of this great project? Or wouldn't it rather harm Wikipedia's reputation as a reliable, comprehensive source of information (i. e. not fiction)?
Boris
Chad Perrin wrote:
> Good points.
> I think the most important criterion, though, should probably be this:
> Will there be people interested in researching in the language?
> I strongly suspect this is why the Klingon Wikipedia is a marginal
> failure. As a concept, it sounds great, and it's true that there are
> some fluent and literate speakers of Klingon, but when the chips are
> down even the Klingon speakers will be doing their research in English,
> or French, or German, or whatever other language they use in their
> day-to-day lives to get by in the world.
> Interest and fluency aren't really enough for a successful reference
> work. You also need it to be useful, or it won't sustain and increase
> its pool of interest.
> Personally, I'd rather see the various Elvish languages of Middle-Earth
> in Wikipedia than Klingon, and I'd be more likely to use it than
> Ossetian, but frankly I think Ossetian might have a place in Wikipedia
> at the present time, and Quenya really doesn't (in my estimation).
> Then again, maybe that's just me.
> --
> Chad
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I just read this blog entry from January:
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php
The author, Danah Boyd, a notable blogger and expert in social networks,
criticized "the Wikipedia entry" for "social network", but she actually
referenced the entry on the Simple English Wikipedia. What's worse,
nobody in the comments corrected her, even though they clearly went to
the English Wikipedia to look up different topics and compare.
I suspect Danah googled for the title rather than visiting Wikipedia.
Picking the wrong site is an easy mistake to make, since, except for the
word "Simple" in the URL and page title, articles from the two sites
look exactly the same. The concept of a "Simple English" Wikipedia is
also not a trivial one to grasp even if someone actually does see it in
the title, so they may just ignore it and think it's some strange
Internet thing. After all, many addresses have things like "www10" or
even arbitrary server names in the front.
If an expert can make that mistake, I'm sure many other people have,
wondering why all the Wikipedia articles they looked at were written in
very juvenile prose and incomplete.
I strongly recommend that we change the look and feel of the Simple
English Wikipedia to avoid that confusion, perhaps going so far to add a
[[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] to that effect. A somewhat different logo would
also help. The changes I can make without being a sysop are limited,
though, and Simple is not particularly active, so I thought I'd bring
this to the attention of the list first.
Regards,
Erik
I'm happy to report that the donation pages and forms for de, en, fr, it, ja,
and most recently nl are all translated!
See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising and
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donazioni for examples.
But in order to maximize donations for our next fund drive (to be held from
Friday 18 February until Friday 4 March) we need more translations.
Below is a table of those that still need some work:
lang page Form-xx Help-xx Onetime-xx Option-xx
ar yes no no no no
cs yes no no no no
es yes no no no no
fi yes no no no no
he yes no no no no
ko yes no no no no
pl yes no no no no
pt yes yes no no no
sv yes no no no no
zh yes no no no no
KEY (full instructions are on the linked pages)
*page (actual donation page | Extremely important)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF/Fundraising/En:
*Form-xx (used to translate donation forms | Very important)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:DonationForm-xx
*Help-xx (help for donors)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:DonateHelp-xx
*Onetime-xx (a message about one time donations)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:DonateOnetime-xx
*Option-xx (used for navigation between forms)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:DonateOption-xx
I'd also like to see translations for all languages for which there are 10,000+
Wikipedia articles. Here is a list of those that so far do not have anything
translated:
bg, ca, da, eo, no, ro, ru, and uk
Of course, all other translations are also welcome and will be posted to the
foundation wiki.
-----------
One last thing. I've noticed that there is no donation link in the side bar for
for many non-Wikipedia wikis and for some Wikipedias. If you are an admin in
any of these wikis *and* a version of the donation page is already on the
Foundation wiki in your language, then please do this:
Edit [[MediaWiki:Sitesupport-url]] and replace '{{SITENAME}}:Site_support' with
'Wikimedia:donate' with 'donate' being the name of the donation page in your
language on the foundation wiki (Spenden, Fundraising, Faites un don, ... etc).
Edit [[MediaWiki:Sitesupport]] and replace the '-' with the word 'Donations'
(or its closest equivalent) translated into your language.
That's it. :)
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
PS - I you have any questions about any of this, then please either respond to
this email or ask me questions on my meta user talk page at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Daniel_Mayer
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I was thinking about another possible portal arrangement, that based on
language family, giving the Latin, French, Spanish, etc. languages a
grouping, the Germanic languages, and so forth. Perhaps not for the main
portal, but rather on the article for Latin or Romance-languages, we could
add a language tree with links to the daughter language wikipedias. Same
with an article on proto-Germanic.
James
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales a écrit:
> It would be fun to do sound recordings of "I love you" in dozens of
> languages, as we did for the "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"
> project.
Hum, I might feel embarassed to record this this time...
I think some of the main disagreements regarding the portal page stem
from disagreements and misunderstandings of its purpose.
Some (myself, sj) believe it should be short and simple, with the sole
purpose of directing users quickly to their intended destination.
Others (GeorgeStepanek, David Gerard) believe it should be our "front
page", Mr Stepanek even advocating a Featured Article template for
each of the top 4 Wikipedias, Mr Gerard suggesting a logo including
the logo text in hexilingual fashion.
In the end nearly all the stylistic disagreements come down to one
question: What is the portal page? What is its purpose?
Before we can find a solution that is satisfactory to most parties
involved (ie, not just users from the en.villagepump and a couple of
others), we need to reach a consensus as to what exactly this portal
is.
My opinion is: The problem (and reason people think it is our
frontpage or that it should be) is that people continue to circulate
wikipedia.org as the URL for "Wikipedia", rather than using the proper
language-specific URLs based on the language medium in which you are
advertising. The only people who end up at wikipedia.org /should/ be
those who guess the URL, or those who pressed "I'm feeling lucky" at
Google (even that may lead to en:). The lack of popular distinction
among English speakers between Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia is
an issue, but it should not concern us when deciding whether we need a
frontpage, or a portal. We have used language-specific domains (and
until recently have redirected visibly to the en subdomain from the
wikipedia.org domain) for long enough now that if they still don't
know, they should be patient enough to look through the top six
languages to find English, which is featured very prominently (yet
some people still complain on en: - boo hoo!)
Mark
Dear all:
Finally I have found my way here where the discussion takes place. There has not been much in meta. I have read arguments from both sides here, and I would like to contribute my ideas to the question we have.
Let me first introduce my language background. My parents' native language is actually Shanghainese, so I know it. I was born and raised in Hong Kong, so I am most fluent in Cantonese. My elementary school used Mandarin as the language of instruction, so I am also fluent in Mandarin. My education later was more and more in English, so I also know the British English dialect. Then I went to USA and became fluent in American English. I also know a little Japanese.
It is very interesting but not surprising to see that the strongest opposition against setting up Wikipedia in Chinese dialects came from Chinese speakers. Yes, we are educated to believe that Chinese is one language and that Qin Shihuang has unified the written language thousands of years ago. One user correctly pointed out that the unified writing system was Classical Chinese (Wenyanwen). Today's Xiandai Hanyu / Baihuawen is actually based on the Mandarin vernacular. People not speaking Mandarin Chinese suddenly became illiterate when they first encountered Baihuawen but education has successfully established the Mandarin vernacular as the new standard of Chinese writing.
Cantonese Chinese : Mandarin Chinese :: British English : American English?
One user has correctly pointed out that the analogy is improper. All linguists agree that the first two dialects are not mutually intelligible but the last two dialects are. The reason that Mandarin speakers can understand writing by people from Hong Kong is that formal education requires students to writing in Mandarin vocabulary and Mandarin grammar. Many students are unaware of the fact just because they do not speak Mandarin. That fact is that every literate Cantonese speaker can understand text written in the Mandarin vernacular. That is why some users argued that text written in Cantonese may not be needed.
Colloquial vs. Vernacular
There could be some misunderstanding that I have to make clear. Standard written Chinese is not in colloquial Mandarin but in vernacular Mandarin. There should be a sense of formality in written literature, and the vocabulary should be standardized, but it should sound natural and grammatical like it is spoken everyday. Standard written Chinese does not sound like Cantonese when every character is pronounced in Cantonese. I must say that the literary vernacular Cantonese standard is not as developed as Mandarin, but as many users has stated, there are people creating Cantonese literature. Although writing a Cantonese encyclopedia will be unprecedented, I supported the idea because I already found Wikipedia in minority languages and fictional languages. I thought: why not give major dialects of China a try?
As an illustration, the language I am writing in is vernacular English. Colloquial English will be like this: http://www.langmaker.com/db/bbl_englishcolloquial.htm
I found that later in the discussion, the opposition started to get focused on the real issue that got my attention: If I am writing the encyclopedia in vernacular Cantonese using traditional Chinese script, how much will it be different from the existing ZH Wikipedia? We can only try it out to see. So far linguistic studies concentrated only on the spoken varieties of Chinese.
Proposal
I propose that we agree on some policies on setting up a Wikipedia in a new language. Since a new Wikipedia will need some good articles to start with anyway, we may ask people who propose new Wikipedia to pick some topics from the 1000 essential articles and write say at least 3 good articles of moderate length and 20 good stubs in the proposed script. A possible location without new setup for those experimental articles will be on meta by using pages with prefixes like "Wikipedia:New/zh-yue-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-wuu-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-guoyu-pinyin/". (By the way, I support Pinyin Wikipedia. If there is a "Simple English" version, why not a pinyin version for people to learn Chinese?)
That is just a thought. How feasible is the idea? Please fill me in on the technical issues. I hope that further discussions here can work on the details formalize the procedure so that every language/dialect can have a fair chance to start a new Wikipedia and have a reasonably good foundation if started.
As for the doubt on how much time I will spend on the Wu Wikipedia? I dont know. How much commitment is required to support an issue on Wikimedia? Is there a policy? The reason I am only active in EN is because I want not only to edit, but to participate in the community. I prefer spending more time on one community first. I have already made some edits on ZH, and I will contribute more.
Felix Wan