Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) wrote:
In response to Sabine,
I think that saying that people can make their own wiki somewhere else is not a good thing. Wikipedia is already established, and the more regional languages we offer, the richer the encyclopedia becomes. Just transferring languages to Wikicities won't work, because over there, those certain Wikipedias stop becoming a free encyclopedias and disintegrate into something a bit more than community forums, often not respecting NPOV. It's sort of what happened with the Enciclopedia Libre episode...
Ok, I understand from this that you don't know me :-) and this is quite logic because I hardly ever write to the lists. I first of all try everything to get things done within the Foundation - but as you can see: the community often does not support a project even if it is worth doing it - or people are generally against something because they are not interested in that and they confound being not interested with being against. This means that there are votes around that say I am not interested and therefore I vote against ... hmmm ...
As for my personal point of view: I would only be against a project if it would harm the whole of the Wikimedia projects and never because I find it useless (because I am not interested in that specific thingie).
If for example Neapolitan would not have been possible within wikipedia I just would have taken neapolitanlanguage.org (one of my private domains) set up the wiki, created everything just like I did now (even having more possibility to influence things ;-) and then I would have said: well here is a neat Neapolitan encyclopedia all GFDL wouldn't this be worthwile to be included in Wikipedia ...
This would be my way to show the no-sayers that they are wrong with a "this language is not worth the effort". This means: do something and not only talk. Generally wikipedias of rare or minority language are low-traffic wikipedias and so anyone can host it without too many problems.
I am for inclusion in Wikipedia, but all too often it does not depend on those 5 people who really want to work on it, but from people that are "not interested and therefore against". So if they want to create their contents: they can do it using the same policies as wikipedia does and then show those people that they are still there, even stronger, back with a certain amount of good articles.
Wikipedias of rare and minority languages need a very different kind of marketing to start up - they give you much more headaches than major languages, you have much more work with it. But every article someone contributes is worth any effort to get it.
Please don't understand the word "marketing" wrong - it means that people must become aware of it - and just using the wikipedia lists is not enough to do that. A great example for me is the Sicilian wikipedia (scn.wikipedia.org) - well: I read loads of mails about how to spell a word correctly (there's no official standard), which variations are correct, how to present "new terminology" you cannot find in antique texts. They do the translation of the week, they do talk in a discussion list about single articles. It is simply great. They are an example to follow since they never imposed "this or that spelling" like this is done in other projects. Everyone is heard, also people who only read and do not actively contribute. But their answers to questions often are very valuable to the editors.
There would be so much to say about this theme - sorry, I have to go back to work and I hope I can manage not reading any mailing lists until I have finished my work ... so "read you this evening" :-)
Ciao, Sabine
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