On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 07:37:19 +0100, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:20:37 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I'd like to request a new Wikipedia for the Friulian language.
I don't feel that one person who admits to being rarely online is enough to justify the creation of a new language Wikipedia.
If you read it, you'll see that this person claims to have another Friulian person interested in working on it.
This would be my third request for an Italian minority language Wikipedia... having requested only a few Wikis, I find it quite strange that three of them should be Italian minority languages (1. Sardinian sc:, 2. Sicilian scn:, 3. Friulian)
Sardinian and Sicilian have only 28 articles between them. The lack of success of these so far should be taken into account when deciding whether another minority language should be started without a more significant number of supporters willing to edit that Wikipedia.
Sardinian is admittedly a dud. Sicilian is still growing steadily, and I'm sure they'd not appreciate the not-so-nice things you seem to think of them.
I propose we adopt Wikitravel's policy of requiring at least five potential contributors before starting a new language. See http://www.wikitravel.org/en/article/Wikitravel:Language_version_policy
Hmm, how many of the Wikipedias with currently over 100 articles started out with more than 5 contributors? From personal experience alone, I can guarantee you that lb: (with currently over 1000 articles) and kw: (with currently over 200 articles) did not, and I'm sure many or even most other Wikipedias are in the same situation.
Also, my definition of "potential contributors" means all the people who speak the language and have Internet access, which in the case of Friulian is well over 5.
And take a look, you'll notice Wikitravel only has 5 languages. Gee, I wonder if this might have anything remotely to do with their policy?
If we require 5 people to commit to working on a new Wikipedia... why not restrict individual article creation on en: by the same criterium? That way, the number of mistakes in Wikipedia will be cut very drastically. But, oh wait, what's that? Yes, inevitability?
At the beginning of this year, according to the sentiments of many, the Kannada Wikipedia should have been deleted.
It is now growing steadily and much of the user interface is in Kannada. And still, although there are more than 5 users, only around 3 of them are actually active.
And how many people speak Kannada? Is it a language with only a couple hundred thousand speakers, like some of our active Wikipedias with over 100 (or even 1000) articles? No... not really... Well, what about under 1 million? No, not really. Under 10 million? Not really.
You see, Kannada is the mother tongue of heaps and heaps of people in the Indian state of Karnataka (kannadaka). It is a Dravidian language.
How many of the Wikipedias we have today would exist now in their present state had they not already existed when content was first added?
Just as if we required people on en: to request a new article we would have much fewer articles, it takes more time and effort and may be confusing to some to figure out how to request a new language.
And how are they to know if there are already two people who would be interested in the creation of such a Wikipedia?
If you are interested in multilingualism, internationalism, and ultimately the building of an NPOV encyclopaedic resource in *any* language, it makes no sense to advocate such restrictions.
For languages that are nobody's first language, such sentiment is understandable to me.
But if we pursue such a policy, I do believe a fork with more liberal policies regarding multilingualism is in order, not in the interest of dividing Wikipedia but rather for the simple reason that by doing this, we would be denying these people something that I do not personally believe we should deny them. If we deny such an opportunity to them, then I can no longer in good faith claim to support this organisation fully and will consider creating a new site and a new foundation with similar principles but with a stronger interest in having policies more greatly favouring multilingualism than what you have proposed.
-- mw