On 5/13/06, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/05/06, Heiko Evermann Heiko.Evermann@gmx.de wrote:
New articles are supposedly allowed to be written in either variety, however the vast majority of existing articles are written in the alternative style. According to proponents of the official orthography, this makes it intimidating to newcomers, and they give that as the reason why the Belarusan Wikipedia is so small still.
It does not make much sense to mix. We have been very unhappy with mixed dialects in the Low Saxon wikipedia. After a lot of discussion and a lot of struggle agains a lone crusader (node_ue :) )we finally managed to have nds.wikipedia.org PLUS nds-nl.wikipedia.org. Now the western folks are happy and we are happy and both wikipedias are flowrishing.
Not a lone crusader -- other people tried for unity as well, for example User:Fidi, but they didn't know much about the inner workings of Wikipedia and so when you silenced their voices, they simply left instead of shouting louder.
You may not think it makes much sense to mix, but plenty of other Wikipedias do it. The Norman Wikipedia mixes dialects and orthographies. I don't really agree with that, Jerriais, Dgernesiais, Serquiais, and Contentiais should, in my view, have separate WPs, but they seem to be making it work, so it can't be said to be undoable.
The nds-nl Wikipedia mixes dialects and orthographies -- ask Servien even. They don't use a single " Dutch Low Saxon" orthography, they use different spelling systems depending on which dialect they are writing.
The Alemannic WP also mixes dialects, I think; orthographies are mixed in the Lombard Wikipedia; orthographies are mixed (to an extent) in the Breton Wikipedia. Mark
Cutting out the stuff I don't reply to. I just want to mention nnwiki and nowiki, which are two Wikipedias for the two Norwegian scripts/dialects/languages. They have existed for ages. Why can't we do the same with other languages? It seems much more convenient than to mix two different scripts in one Wikipedia.
/Andreas