Message: 11
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 20:29:05 +0100
From: Gerard Meijssen
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The role of a wikipedia for a language like
Hopi
To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <4231F181.60408(a)gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Delirium wrote:
> Ulf Lunde wrote:
>
>> I also wanted to say that I agree that gerard Meijssen's point is very
>> important: The wikipedias are indeed culture-bearers for their
>> respective populations, and not just for humanity as a whole!
>
> I disagree that this should be the case, and to the extent that it is,
> feel it should be corrected. Languages are not culture, although they
> have connections with it.
>
Languages are not culture ?? Encyclopedias most certainly are !! Please
consider what words are used in a culture. The English used reflects the
culture the person speaking or writing comes from. The idea that you can
divorse culture from language is odd. When comparing articles on the
same topic the diffferences are sometimes huge.
> If we wanted languages to be identified with culture, then we should
> split some up, and have a "United States" wikipedia as a
> culture-bearer for the U.S., a "French Canadian" Wikipedia as a
> culture-bearer for French-Canadians, and so on. But we don't, and to
> the extent possible keep these together. In essence, the only reason
> we have separate Wikipedias at all is because of language
> barriers---when languages are similar enough to keep together (as with
> the French spoken in Canada vs. France vs. Algeria), we do so.
>
> Or do people actually seriously think we *should* have separate
> Wikipedias catering to different cultures?
When we have an encyclopedia with articles that are acceptable to all
people who speak a language, we aim to achieve a neutral point of view
and provide more extended information. We want to maintain one wikipedia
bridging the divide between the cultures that use a language. Given the
virtually limitless amount of harddrive capacity we have articles on
cricket and honkbal. We are happy to host any topic that is of intrest.
What this discussion is about, is not about en: or fr: It is about Hopi.
By having a Hopi or a Dutch or a Frisian wikipedia, you allow many
topics to be narrated with a Hopi, Dutch or Frisian point of view. Not a
non-neutral but with a Hopi, Dutch or Frisian point of view. This is
good because certain things that are true from an English perspective
are plain different and non-neutral from another culture point of view.
To put it bluntly, the words mean different things, they have different
conotations denying people a resource like that is like denying that
languages differ and that languages reflect a culture.
The UN has a mother language day. This day is to celebrate the diversity
of the cultures of the world. All languages have a need for good
information, that is what wikimedia aims to provide. The argument that
the Dutch can read and write English and do not their own wikipedia is
great. It only reminds me of a recent tiff I was in, where I was accused
of not being able to express myself in English... So please allow me to
read and write in Nederlands and, I will not be asking for a wikipedia
in Westfries. :) And I do apologize for my poor English (or was it
apologise ...)
I would almost accept your point if you agree to only read French or
Chinese in future. You will find how much it will divorce you from the
culture that you live in.
Thanks,
GerardM
I agree with Gerard here. I believe scn.wiki serves to explore certain topics from a Sicilian perspective. Why? Rely on the English wikipedia to be NPOV about matters relevant to Sicily? Yeh, right! Do that and you may be excused for thinking that Frederick II never set foot in Sicily and was entirely uninfluenced by his education and upbringing in Palermo (in fact he was educated in Rome according to en.wiki!! the discussion page even questions whether he could possibly have spoken 9 languages - but if they knew anything about medieval Sicily, they would not bother asking the question); that the Sicilian language pretty much stopped developing during the Saracen epoch (with Norman French, Catalan and Spanish, after many paragraphs, being mentioned briefly in one closing line as "influences"); that "Trinacria" may not have come to exist as the Greek name for the island because of the triangular shape of the island - surely this can't be so because it predates proper
cartographic technology, i.e. if the English, Americans, or North Europeans didn't do it first - as if a bunch of southern Europeans could have managed it!
NPOV? Please, spare me.
pippu d'angelo
---------------------------------
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Hoi,
There is this joke about these Americans asking for the "tjamps
ilajsies" in Paris, and nobody ever heard of it... Many words cannot be
properly pronounced by people not speaking the language. Many news
organisations have their presenters trained in pronouncing foreign words..
When we write about things foreign, there is often no difinitive word
for the subject in the language that the article is written in. So often
we try to find something that will do. Most often we use what others
used before us, often it is a transliteration or a transcription to yet
another language. With our digital encyclopedia, it is easy to add
pronunciation of words in the local language. We often add how it is
written in another script and, it would make equal sense to add the
pronunciation in the local language as well.
As an example I have done this in the wikipedias for "Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer" and for "Silvio Berlusconi". I have also pronounced and
uploaded the category of Dutch politicians from the en:wikipedia to
Commons... Could an American please pronounce and upload George W. Bush
and a Chinese 胡锦涛 ??
Thanks,
GerardM
Hi again, I posted this a few days ago but I think my thread might have
gotten lost.
I'm trying to get a hold of the templates used by the Wikipedia's
Bugzilla installation. I like the fact that wikipedia's bugzilla is
using the monobook style as it makes both the bugzilla nd wikipedia look
like one product.
I'm using wikipedia for an internal documentation resource and also
bugzilla for bug tracking so I'd like to also have my bugzilla use the
monobook style. Unfortunately making templates in bugzilla is not as
simple as just copying .css files :(
Does anyone know how I can get a copy of the templates used on
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/
Thanks,
Jc
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:35:08 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:32:59 +0100, Angela <beesley(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:25:53 +0100, Nicolas Weeger
> > <nicolas.weeger(a)laposte.net> wrote:
> > > I think there was a research paper (from the MIT?), some months/years ago, that analysed how a specific article on Wikipedia was modified, showing the slow modifications over time and a few big changes.
> >
> > This was the " history flow" study, and can be seen at
> > http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/
>
> Has there been contact with IBM about the possibility to use their
> work? For example, I think it would be interesting to create these
> diagrams for a large number of Wikipedia pages, and make those
> available.
Yes. Two weeks ago, I visited the group that did the history flow
study, and spent a couple of hours talking to Martin Wattenberg about
their interest in wikis and some of their ongoing projects.
I'll write more about this later tonight, but they are thinking about
this -- one of them suggested the idea of running history flow on an
article once a week and producing a little thumbnail that could
appear next to the article title -- and working on providing the tool
for others to use.
Jack Lutz wrote:
> I emailed Martin Wattenberg about using an image in their paper and did
> not receive a response.
Which image was it?
--
+sj+
Frankly spoken, I am totally against that idea because I think it would lead to a fragmentation of the knowledge that we are trying to collect. I couldn't think of any Indian topics that wouldn't have a place in the general English encyclopedia. The main advantage of a large encyclopedia is that is gathers knowledge from various fields (in our case, in many different languages). We shouldn't fragmentize knowledge but rather unify it in one single place. Once we'd start splitting Wikipedias into separate editions for ethnic or cultural groups, it would eventually lead to "Wikipedias for Christians", "Wikipedias for Muslims", "Wikipedias for Women", "Wikipedias for Students", "Wikipedias for Seniors" and the like, and all of them would have to be translated into 200 languages. Would that still constitute a "Free Encyclopedia" then or wouldn't it rather mean of plethora of "closed shops".
IMHO, our main advantage is that we bring together people with all different sorts of backgrounds and enable them to *cooperate*. Thus we are able to attract as much knowledge as we presently do. The exchange between people of very different origins is a unique feature of Wikipedia. Any sort of separation or segregation among Wikipedia's contributors would invariably effect the level of quality we have been able to achieve, simply because it would mean a brain-drain for the general Wikipedia.
Nevertheless certains steps in order to better serve specific communities of users can very well make sense. More than that, they would raise Wikipedia's value even more. AFAIK WikiReaders provide a very useful tool for that and so do categories and lists. Please let us not make knowledge exclusive while we are striving to unify it in one single place were it is easily accessible to everyone. We're here to remove obstacles to knowledge and not to errect new ones.
wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org schrieb am 11.03.05 20:25:23:
Sure, that's a way to go. But not to the detriment of the big English or
French Wikipedias. Especially there could be an Indian (South Asia)
Wikipedia in English. But only when the time comes that a lot of people want
it.
Fred
> From: Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 13:48:28 -0500
> To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The role of a wikipedia for a language like Hopi
>
> Or do people actually seriously think we *should* have separate
> Wikipedias catering to different cultures?
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Hoi,
To start off with. As far as I am concerned, when the requirements are
met for a new project, it can be created. With five people adding one
article a week, you have100 articles in 20 weeks. I am happy with that.
What we have to consider when we talk about our wikipedias, is that no
two projects have the same content. Translations exist, but the majority
of the articles written contain info that makes it particular to the
language and reflects a culture. We aim to have an encyclopedia in every
spoken language. For me it is important that the content that is
important for a culture can be found in a wikipedia. When some argue
that English will do for the Hopi, I would argue that this may be true
for the general information that is provided in the English wikipedia. I
would also argue that content will be lacking that is particular to the
Hopi. When people who speak Hopi find the urge to create a Hopi
Wikipedia and decide not to write about the 1000 subjects that every
wikipedia ought to have. I would not be bothered. When they write an
encyplodia about their culture, about the things that are relevant to
the Hopi, I would be absolutely thrilled.
When the Hopi encyclopedia wants to include things that are of a more
general nature, it would be great. I am of the opinion that wikipedia is
an encyclopedia. Articles should be well written and encyclopedic in
nature. .
Thanks,
GerardM
Whoops, I owe an apology to the Swedes: the Swedish Wikipedia
is bigger than the Icelandic, even if you take the number of
speakers into account.
I also wanted to say that I agree that gerard Meijssen's point is very
important: The wikipedias are indeed culture-bearers for their
respective populations, and not just for humanity as a whole!
The Esperanto wikipedia is a good example of just this. You'll find
plenty of articles there with information which might be considered
vanity, or at least not encyclopedic enough, in other languages'
wikipedias.
Verdlanco
Muke Tever wrote:
> Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella(a)yahoo.it> wrote:
>
>> Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off
>> the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs
>> (or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page
>> and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?
>
>
> Why delete the redirects? You'll break all the old pages on the web
> that link
> to Wiktionary articles.
>
> You'll have to think of other wikimedia sites too. For example
> en.wikipedia's
> "link to Wiktionary" template currently just uses {{PAGENAME}}, which
> will always
> be capitalized, because Wikipedia capitalizes all topics it treats.
>
>
> *Muke!
Hoi,
You delete the redirects because they are plain wrong. A word that has
has both a capitalised version and a non capitalised version will be
split into two versions. The usage of wikipedia's link to Wiktionary
currently does indeed use PAGENAME, how do you know that it still refers
to the correct version of the word ?? You do not ! So it needs to be
changed as PAGENAME is not good enough.
It is feasible to change the PAGENAME to something else for instance a
genuine parameter that is either capitalised or not. I think it would be
feasible to have a bot check the occrurence of the old template and
change it for a capitalised or an uncapitalised REAL parameter. So
practically all the instances of the current template need to be changed
anyway.
The decision of the capitalisation on en:wiktionary has been made, now
it is necessary to plan a good conversion plan. It will hurt and it will
be a lot of work. Extra painfull is the fact that the en:wiktionary did
not agree to change the first time round because MANY new words have
been added in the mean time. I think it is better to suffer a bit and do
a good job than to do an incomplete job and not remove the pain.
One other reason why you want to change the current wiktionary content
is because you will not add redirects for all the new words that will be
added in the future.
Thanks,
GerardM
> the Norwegian (Nynorsk) Wikipedia takes a clear lead with over 8 articles
> pr 1000 inhabitants.
Ummm... not quite. As I have just mentioned in the "Hopi" thread, *Esperanto*
has an even higher ratio.
But the Esperanto wikipedia is an old one. Nynorsk's 8.2 articles
per 1,000 speakers is pretty impressive after less than one year in
existence!
Verdlanco