Dear Mark Williamson, Lars Alvik, Andre Engels and Wolfram (who is getting
a BCC of this message),
This is getting so old... <sigh> I agree with Lars Alvik that the no:/nb:
Wikipedia is de facto Norsk (Bokmål). The user interface is about 100%
percent Norsk Bokmål, the vast majority of the articles are Norsk Bokmål
(with varying tendencies towards centrist Bokmål or towards "Moderate
Bokmål"/ Riksmål). Few, if any, new articles are written in Nynorsk. I
don't know what the proportions of existing articles are, but I suspect
that well under 5% of the articles are in Nynorsk now.
nn: is being marketed as "Nynorsk Wikpedia". I am not sure what the
consensus about name for the no:/nb: Wikipedia is. A couple days ago, I
looked around for it, but could not find it. It doesn't really matter very
much for this discussion what self-designation no:/nb: uses. Nynorsk
Wikipedia has a seeming discrepancy of names between its marketed name
(Nynorsk Wikipedia) and the interwiki link name (Norsk (Nynorsk)). It is
extremely unlikely that having a similar discrepancy between marketed name
and interwiki link name is going to have any adverse effect whatsoever on
no:/nb:.
Whether Nynorsk or Bokmål or Riksmål (or Samnorsk or Høgnorsk, at that) is
the good or bad "guy", the oppressor or oppressed, or the "relevant" or
"irrelevant" one in whatever connection, seems to be a factor of very
little relevance.
Interwiki link language names should first and foremost be precise and
descriptive -- right...?
At present there is one Wikipedia with a Bokmål interface (for the record,
the difference between "Moderate Bokmål" and Riksmål is, at most, a few
dozen words with spelling differences of one or two letters) and almost
exclusively Bokmål(/Riksmål) articles. This Wikipedia, which was
established in 2001, is doing quite well -- right now, the article count
shows 18,679 articles.
There is also one Wikipedia with a Nynorsk interface (which includes a few
articles in Høgnorsk). It was started in July 2004 and has 3430 articles
right now -- it is, in other words, also doing quite well.
Both these are predominantly written in an official form of Norwegian.
Neither of the two is more Norwegian, and neither is less.
Nynorsk corresponds most closely to the spoken language of the majority of
Norwegian speakers, Bokmål is written by the majority of Norwegian
speakers. Both are recognised as official languages of Norway. Both have a
large body of literature on a high quality level. As such, they are both
important, relevant expressions of Norwegian and should be treated with the
tolerance, fairness and respect they both deserve.
The term "Standard Norwegian" (quoted by Andre Engels from a message from
Wolfram to him) is a bit of a stretch: There is in fact (as already
mentioned above) no single "Standard Norwegian", but *two*: Bokmål
(including subsets like Riksmål, moderat bokmål and radikalt bokmål; and,
to some extent, Samnorsk) and Nynorsk (including subsets like Høgnorsk,
Midlandsnormal, Austlandsk, etc.)
To Wolfram's defense (since he doesn't subscribe to this list and hence
can't defend himself directly on the list), it should be said that he does
participate on nn: -- in editing, in debates, as well as in uploading
files, and his contributions are as welcome on nn: as I hope that mine, and
others' who also write primarily on nn: these days, are on no:/nb:... :-)
Lars Alvik (whose opinions and discussion manners I have learned to respect
very much), wrote (03:10 03/03/2005 +0000):
>Go for no:.
>Riksmål can be compared to bokmål as american english and english. Minor
>differences. As for Aftenposten it's in theory riksmål, but generally the
>articles is written in moderate bokmål.
>
>As for me i would welcome a formalization of no: to just bokmål
>(and riksmål), but with bokmål as the dominant one, ie, all the
>categories in bokmål. (example Sør-Afrika instead of Syd-Afrika).
I agree almost 100% wholly with what Lars says here.
It would by all likelihood be a major benefit for the no: Wikipedia to
formalise its language as Bokmål, with the very closely-related Riksmål
being accepted as part of this.
One significant part of the reason why Nynorsk Wikipedia was established
was that we wanted to be able to work in an environment tuned-in on Nynorsk
as a written language. This is also very much what we have found to happen:
Besides the basic fact-checking and debating of points of view, we have a
strong emphasis on orthography, syntax, semantics and style.
I suspect that a change of politics on no: towards really focussing on
Bokmål (in its variety) could have a similar effect, and it would very
likely be a very good way of strengthening the Bokmål (widely defined)
writing culture.
But whether the no:/nb: Wikipedia wishes to keep a few articles in Nynorsk
or not, or what the no:/nb: Wikpedia is called is not really the main issue
here, I think.
What the issue seems to be is more about what should show up in interwiki
links.
I believe that the most precise and descriptive LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION in
INTERWIKI links is "Norsk (bokmål)"
-- not "Norsk" (because it is only one of two subsets that are officially
recognised as "Standard Norwegian"), and
-- and not "Bokmål", because this will be likely to cause confusion when
users don't find the language under "N".
Whether this comes up by coding "nb:" or "no:" is not really important. It
is the result that counts, right?
PLEASE NOTE that the question is NOT whether to call no:/nb: "Bokmål" or
"Norsk".
The question is whether interwiki links on the bottom left of the screen
should display "Norsk (bokmål)" or just "Norsk".
It was suggested here earlier that no: be made a general "Norwegian"
portal, and that nb: would be the primary code for the mainly Bokmål
Wikipedia. That seems to be politically impossible in the current environment.
Maybe the most logical step in the current situation would be to change the
display of the "no:" code so that it displays "Norsk (bokmål)" in interwiki
links? That way, the interwiki links will be descriptive/factual: Norsk
(bokmål) vs. Norsk (nynorsk), rather than prescriptive: Norsk vs. Norsk
(nynorsk).
I will support such a modification wholeheartedly. If this happens, I am
pretty sure that the Nynorsk wikipedia community will be as willing as
anyone else to use the code no: exclusively if it displays a descriptive
name of what no: de facto is.
Meanwhile, the use of a currently secondary interwiki code (nb:) is the
only way to ensure logical interwiki links from Norsk (nynorsk) to Norsk
(bokmål), and no matter how Wolfram feels about that, his argument that
no:/nb: should decide their own name has as a consequence that nn:
should decide how to build interwiki links on their own project.
Since this question involves many other parties too, I personally find this
question ("Norsk" vs "Norsk (bokmål)") to be one that should be discussed
and resolved in an open, democratic, respectful and transparent way here on
wikipedia-l -- a forum which is there precisely to work on solving these
kinds of issues... That means that we should stay factual and try very hard
not to avoid loaded characterisations like "Nynorsk hater"/"Bokmål
hater"/"language fanatic" and the like, or imprecise expressions like
"Standard Norwegian" when Bokmål(/Riksmål) (only one out of two standard
forms of Norwegian) is implied.
(When it comes to acceptance/non-acceptance of specific language varieties,
that is a totally different issue that would be at least as logical to
resolve locally to the extent possible.)
I wish that Wolfram, who plays a rather central rôle on no:/nb:, would
participate here and join the open debate in the "Wikipedia spirit". The
burden isn't really that big -- after all, one doesn't have to read every
single message. But it is useful for all parties if central people are able
to participate in debates about their "own" project when these discussions
occur...
Respectfully,
Olve Utne
("User:Olve" -- bureaucrat of nn:, admin of no:/nb:, user on en:, sv:, da:,
etc.)
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
Ooops :)
I wrote:
>That means that we should stay factual and try very hard not to avoid
>loaded characterisations...
That was of course meant to read:
>That means that we should stay factual and try very hard to avoid loaded
>characterisations...
(The curse of incomplete editing strikes again... ;-] )
-Olve
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
We met and then well-exceded the goal to raise $75,000 (USD) in this quarter's
fund drive. See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1 for
details (still waiting for final numbers in every source category so final
grand total will be higher).
I consider 11:59 PM Monday 28 February 2005 (eastern US timezone since PayPal
data are not available in UTC) as the official end of our fund drive for
accounting purposes. As of right now though, all fund drive notes should be
replaced by congratulatory messages that can be left until midnight on Thursday
(UTC). After that, [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] should be blanked until the next
fund drive.
For reference, here is the message displayed on the English Wikipedia:
<!-- this notice should stay until 12AM Thursday 11 March -->
<div class="fundraising" id="fundraising" style="margin-top:5px;">
You did it! Thanks to your generosity we exceeded our fund drive goal by 15%.
([[wikimedia:Fund drives/2005/Q1|details]])<br>
<small>
Show your pride in Wikipedia by purchasing merchandise through
[http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia our Cafe Press shop].
</small> </div>
My regular home computer will not boot for some unknown reason, so I will not
be able to run the Day 10 (Sunday) report at this time. Day 11 (Monday) will be
the final report for this fund drive.
Daniel Mayer,
Wikimedia CFO
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wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org wrote:
> I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
> test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
> English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
> a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
> fact tested even better!
IMHO the English Wikipedia was and continues to be better than
the German one, both in terms of quality and quantity. This of course
does not hold for topics that are related to Germany.
best regards,
Marco
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