I know it's kind of off-topic, but I'm writing because I couldn't find
Wikisource mailing list.
There is a collection of official Korean transliteration rules,
published by South Korean government over years and counting, under
public domain. I'm converting them to fit in wiki syntax, but here is
the problem: As well as the orginal source, which is sorted by
chronogical order, I want to rearrange the documents so that the
readers would find them more convenient.
This way the sources would be useful, some Wikipedians including me
would need that -- but I worry that it would make more difficult to
maintain them when more rules are annouced in the future. And I wonder
how this could be handled by the Wikisource's policy.
Have there been any similar case in English Wikisource?
Puzzlet Chung
Hi,
I am one of the admins in the Kurdish Wikipedia. We have just noted, that
the name of our language in the "other languages:" colunm (interwiki) has
changed from the Roman to the Arabic script, from "kurdî" to "كوردي". We
were very surprised about that. What is the reason for the change?
Kurdish is written in both scripts, that's a fact, and we are trying to run
the Wikipedia with both alphabets - Roman and Arabic. We want to have all
alphabets and all dialects in one Wikipedia. Noone so far has proposed to
split the Wiki.
But as a matter of fact, 99% of the Kurdish Wikipedia is writen in the Roman
(Latin) Alphabet. In Roman script, the name of Kurdish is "kurdî". This was
also the case in all interwiki links. The portal www.wikipedia.org is so
kind to use both scripts (look under 100+).
We would be happy with both scripts in the interlinks or with Latin, as it
is used anywhere in the Kurdish speakin areas. But ONLY the arabic script
makes it very hard to recognize for probably the majority of Kurds (and
people worldwide).
So could it please be changed back?
Thanks,
Erdal
Datrio just started a poll on closing Serbo-Croatian wiki, unblocked a
vandal who blanked dozens of articles, and made up rules that people
who've been targeting Serbo-Croatian wiki can vote, pretty much
disregarding all the people involved in the project.
Datrio, may I ask you why??? I really, truly, don't understand. We get
a vandal, few trolls to support the vandal, and your response is to
close the wiki!?
This poll is here:
http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pijaca-%D0%9F%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0%D1%8…
>Moreover, they speak culturally and liguistically 3 different languages
>and it's sometimes hard for me to understand what Bosnians or Croats
>are saying just because of the diversity (I'm a Serb, by the way).
Does this confusion pass over into reading aswell? I have trouble
understanding what some people with thick English accents say,
doesn't mean I can't understand everything that they write.
Perhaps if you are struggling with understanding something written in the
Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias, you could pass it over to someone else
to translate for you?
Stop clouding the issue.
Fran
> Caroline Ford wrote:
>
> >But linguistically almost _the_ test of "what is a language" is mutual
> >comprehensibility.
> >
> A helpful tool, perhaps, but hardly the defining test. Consider the
> Scandinavian languages.
>
> I would venture that the linguistic relationship between
> Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian is somewhat like the relationship between
> Danish/Norwegian/Swedish was from the Kalmar Union to the 19th-century
> period of romantic nationalism (after accounting for the increased
> uniformity promoted in more modern times by the printing press and
> universal education). The present differences are partly exaggerated for
> political reasons, but the political side of the equation is also likely
> to produce increasing distinguishability in a real sense over time. A
> single Serbo-Croatian wiki might be the right choice if we thought
> language was something frozen in place. If we conclude that languages
> continue to evolve, separate wikis might ultimately be more appropriate.
> In the interim, while this remains unsettled, I don't think it's
> necessarily awful that we're working along both tracks simultaneously.
>
> --Michael Snow
Thank you for inserting some wisdom into this discussion. Frankly, I'm
saddened by many knee-jerk responses along the lines of "Language x has
one wikipedia, why should it be any different with Croatian, Bosnian and
Serbian?". I can partly understand that, but I'd like to emphasize that
this is _not_ an initiative to split off British English from
English. English is not Croatian, Spanish is not Norwegian, Turkish is not
Russian. Languages differ in everything, including how close they are to
other languages.
I know a lot about American and British culture,
society etc., and this knowledge has also taught me to avoid
assumptions and quick judgements about other cultures and to accept the
actions and judgements of those closest to the problems as most probably
right - that you should not be telling other people that they are silly,
you should try to _understand why_ are they doing what they're doing.
The existence of Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia at this point in time probably
has as much purpose as the existence of Norwegian-Danish Wikipedia.
Real Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia already exists elsewhere - it is Serbian,
Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia taken together, with cooperations, article
translations and mutual help on various things, all increasing in frequency.
It is my hope that the three Wikipedias will grow and develop along the Scandinavian model, with
common featured articles and interwiki links,
and also with reasonable people, speakers of all three languages,
acting in good faith to improve NPOV on all languages (as has already
happened on several occasions). It is on this foundation that Wikipedias
should evolve, not on forced unifications and mass verbatim copying
of articles to a common dumping ground.
Elephantus
from Croatian Wikipedia
--
XXLadsl ponuda do 15.01.2006.- veće brzine, iste cijene. Samo kod
IskonInterneta uz XXLadsl surfajte 60 dana neograničeno za samo 1kunu!
Since I was one of the blocked in the sh project and I am one of the
guys that's "most responsible" for this, I thought that it would be best
to write here.
I agree with Elephantus here and I think that this project represents
nothing but a carbon copy of some articles from three distinct
wikipedias. Pokrajac, one of the admins at SH constantly claims that
Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are same languages, which is completely
insane. The languages have started diverging a long time ago and since
the 1990s, they have become more distant. It is true that the speakers
of those 3 languages are mutually intelligible, but that doesn't mean
that they speak the same language.
Moreover, they speak culturally and liguistically 3 different languages
and it's sometimes hard for me to understand what Bosnians or Croats are
saying just because of the diversity (I'm a Serb, by the way). Also,
these three wikipedias came out of Serbocroatian Wikipedia for a reason.
And they are not going to converge again and merge into SH. It's an
idealistic pro-yugoslavian thought that might work in an alternate
reality, but taking cultural, linguistic and other properties into
consideration, this can never be achieved and striding towards it is
only one step forward, but seven steps back.
Furthermore, as far as I know, there aren't any statistics proving that
a percentage of people claim that Serbocroatian language still exists,
or even less that they use it. If there were some kind of evidence that,
say, 20% of the people that speak sr, hr or bs, still consider
Serbocroatian as a valid language, then there wouldn't be problems.
But, there is some kind of public awareness - it is my opinion that most
of the people dislike the phrase Serbocroatian and that they would stick
with something less contrived.
Conversely, I'd like to say that the space used for this project (read:
duplication of material that could/should be found elsewhere) is the
space that an African language of millions may use for spreading
cultural beliefs etc.
Overall, I think that keeping this project alive would be a selfish
idea, because only 3 people are willing to really contribute to it (btw,
don't let the recent changes as they are now fool you - they are usually
very slow, but filled with new articles with summaries like /Copied from
Serbian Wikipedia/, /Pasted from Croatian Wikipedia/ et al.)
And now to reply to some earlier posts:
To Daniel Meyer:
As I said on IRC, you're very wrong. I'm sorry to break it to you this
way, but Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian ARE different languages, albeit
mutually intelligible.
And the political conotation is way too big to neglect. People have
chosen to have separate wikipedias: just look at the growth of the three
in comparison to the "united one" (which is basically a fork). The three
didn't come out of the SH for no reason.
I agree with you that an active community means that the project should
be kept. In this case, the community is only relatively active (in this
case, activity = blatant copying and, although not a crime, it is
generally frowned upon). What I'm trying to say is that 3 people with
IMO wrong beliefs are holding this project down and because of that,
they have sympathizers that agree with them, although they don't really
know the problem itself.
To Dejan Cabrilo:
Knock it off with POV. I think it's better to have POV in some articles
(that are properly tagged) and just wait for those articles to meet
better contributors. Rome wasn't built in a day. What I think is wrong
is the lack of policy of Serbocroatian Wikipeda - there is no policy
about the script. You can write in Cyrillics, you can write in Latin
script, and no one really cares, which is IMO inexcusible. Furthermore,
this appearance of 2 scripts in the system messages is just wrong and
useless. Since variants (script conversion) is going to be introduced in
Serbian Wikipedia shortly, Serbocroatian is becoming obsolete.
Thanks for your time.
Filip Maljkovic, bureaucrat from Serbian wikipeda
Caroline Ford wrote:
>But linguistically almost _the_ test of "what is a language" is mutual
>comprehensibility.
>
A helpful tool, perhaps, but hardly the defining test. Consider the
Scandinavian languages.
I would venture that the linguistic relationship between
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian is somewhat like the relationship between
Danish/Norwegian/Swedish was from the Kalmar Union to the 19th-century
period of romantic nationalism (after accounting for the increased
uniformity promoted in more modern times by the printing press and
universal education). The present differences are partly exaggerated for
political reasons, but the political side of the equation is also likely
to produce increasing distinguishability in a real sense over time. A
single Serbo-Croatian wiki might be the right choice if we thought
language was something frozen in place. If we conclude that languages
continue to evolve, separate wikis might ultimately be more appropriate.
In the interim, while this remains unsettled, I don't think it's
necessarily awful that we're working along both tracks simultaneously.
--Michael Snow
Serbian Wikipedia has more then 10.000 normal articles; Croatian has
at least 6.000-8.000 normal articles.
Articles that include the year 2056:
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/2056
I don't think ''number of articles'' is a reasonable benchmark in this case.
Fran