Hi Tomasz,
By stating the fact that they aren't working now I didn't mean to imply that they will never work. Me too, I believe the Kashubian Wikipedia has a future. But I think one also has to acknowledge that presently roughly half of all Wikipedias look different than the German, Polish or even Kashubian editions in their early days (=historical perspective). It's not like they grow slowly - they don't grow at all even though many of them have existed for two or more years now. The reasons are manifold, of course, and have been discussed here before.
I fully agree with you that any useful encyclopedia needs 10k+ (quality) articles to be a useful source of information. Think of a printed encyclopedia with less articles. You'd never be able to find the information you're looking for and it would probably only tell you things you already know. I'd most likely just throw it away. Bottom line: it takes a huge number of articles and that takes a large number of editors (with good language skills, preferably native speakers). And I think it's this very fact that people ignore when suggesting e. g. a Wikipedia in Chinook Trade Jargon. Who is supposed to write that encyclopdia?
Just like you, Tomasz, I expect and hope many of the minor WPs to grow in the future. But I doubt that e. g. Interlingue, Nauruan, Yiddish, Lojban, Klingon, Volapük, Hawaiian, Aromanian, Manx, Gothic, Pali, Aramaic, Choctaw, Hiri Motu or Muscogee will ever reach that critical mass where they can rightly be considered as encyclopedias. In my opion, that's a fact we must not overlook when discussing about new language editions of Wikipedia.
Boris
wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org schrieb am 09.07.05 14:25:56:
On Sat, Jul 09, 2005 at 01:37:50PM +0200, Boris Lohnzweiger wrote:
However, I think it's finally time to realize that not every language is suitable for a wikipedia. Matter of fact, from a realistic perspective we have more Wikipedias that aren't working than ones that are.
You lost historical perspective. I remember times when German Wikipedia had so friggin awesome 1200 articles (mostly stubs, by today's standards), and we tried to get over 500 on the Polish Wikipedia. It wasn't such a long time ago. Now the German Wikipedia seems like the best German-language encyclopedia ever made, and the Polish Wikipedia is likely to reach similar status in a year or two.
On the other hand Kashubian Wikipedia has now 661 articles and so many people consider it a hopeless effort that can't possibly work.
Not all of the currently small Wikipedias will grow, but it's very likely that most of them will get to into "useful" (10k+ articles) range in just a few years, and by then we will have a lot of new small Wikipedias that people will keep whining about, how hopeless their efforts supposedly are.
I, for one, believe the Kashubian Wikipedia and others like it have future. _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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