Also, please note that a native of highly-competent fluent speaker should be around for any new Wikipedia.
Recent problems with adminship and earlier problems with various other things on the Irish Wikipedia arose due to the fact that one of the first members and the first administrator and then bureaucrat is not a fluent Irish speaker; other similar and related problems have arisen elsewhere (on mi: with Perl, on na: with Belgian Man, on sm: with Robin Patterson, etc).
Mark
On 07/07/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
You're not realising the meaning of "natural language" here. It doesn't mean a language that is "natural", but rather a language that was formed by natural processes rather than having been intentionally conceived.
"Natural language" includes pidgins, creoles, most jargons, mixed languages, and the like as they weren't intentionally constructed -- creolisation and related processes are natural processes, whereas an opthamologist writing a book trying to teach a language that until then hadn't existed is not a natural process.
I have some problems with the creation of a Chinook Wawa Wikipedia. Nowadays, the creation of a Wikipedia generally requires the demonstration that it will actually be active. I encourage you and other Chinook Wawa speakers and enthusiasts to set up a "test Wikipedia" at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/wawa/ on the model of the Scots, Cantonese, and other test Wikipedias.
You can also do the same for Ladino (I would recommend http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/lad/ ), and it would probably have a better chance of getting created sooner if you did.
Please note that, as noted at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages , the current policy or lack thereof means that a new Wiki can be created at the whim of a developer. Thus, 5 supporters is not a hard and fast requirement. If you have 3 people, and the 3 of you build a test Wikipedia of a considerable size, it's quite possible that a Wikipedia could be created for you anyhow.
Mark
On 07/07/05, Ros' Haruo rosharuo@gmail.com wrote:
In the discussion on setting up Ladino, Angela gave some useful information which included that (paraphrasing from memory) "for natural languages, once there are five supporters and no objections, it can be set up".
I'm interested in how the standards differ for "unnatural languages", and/or what the line of demarcation is (or are there several). I'm also interested in what happens if there *is* an objection to a particular language. As an Esperantist (but not denaska) I always see a red flag in the phrase "natural languages", since subjectively to me Esperanto is quite as natural as my original native langauge, English, and much more natural than my attempts at, say, Dutch. But the case I have in mind is Chinook Jargon. I've been talking up the idea of a Chinuk Wawa Wikipedia on CJ mailing lists, and there is some favorable response. But is it a "natural language"? (And if not, what hoops does it have to jump through to get a wiki?) It started out, after all, as sort of the Esperanto of the Northwest Coast. Now it survives in actual spoken use mainly on the Grand Ronde Reservation in Oregon, though there are hundreds of people around the world who use it to some extent in writing (including on the web), most of whom use a form closer to the original pidgin than to the creole now spoken at GR; but all these people consider themselves in some sense members of a single language community.
Haruo
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