Kaixo!
On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 09:02:37PM +0300, V. Ivanov wrote:
While the larger language Wikipedias compete with commercial encyclopedias (and the larger language speakers have the choice), the smaller language Wikipedias are _unique_, the speakers of such language don't have much choice -- and Wikipedia appears to be the only _try_ to create an encyclopedia. It also can become the main source for a future "official" encyclopedia, which might be too expensive for a not so large people, if all the authors are paid.
That's so true.
Here I share my experience with Walloon wikipedia. Walloon language doesn't have any official support at all (while Wallonia has quite very great autonomy in several areas (including the ability to sovereingly sign internationa treaties), the areas of culture, edutcation and medias are outside the scope of the Walloon government, and the body in charge of them seems to do anything to hide differences that may exist between Wallonia and Brussels (and the native language is indeed such a difference); as a result you won't find anything with official backing in Walloon language. But even about the language, you can't find much (most of the existing texts (in French or German) have been written in the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries).
When I discovered Wikipedia, I wanted to have a Walloon version, mainly for the prestige increase that would give to the language; I didn't knew however if that could success or not; the number of users is still low (only three very frequent contributors, and a small handfull of occasional ones; less than 10 in total, but I hope there are more readers). However, once it started to run it had some effects I didn't expected at first. The first one, is a living example of coperative work where a common spelling is need; because as long as you write novels, poetry or even journalistic articles, which have a single author, the normalization of the spelling can be avoided; but when a single text may have (and indeed, has) many authors, a common spelling is a practical necessity. There has been also a good number of articles about Walloon language and culture and about Wallonia; yes the content is heavily tilted that way, more than I thought at the beginning (but will change with time probably), but on the other side I learned a lot of things that I ignored previously, about writters, historic personnages, places or rivers of my country, that I should have known but didn't, as there isn't any public nor private mass diffusion of that info; in fact wikipedia had come the first source of information on the internet for some of those topics, and something we are proud of. Also, the copying of articles from other wikipedias, have pushed the need for Walloon terminology about some topics that traditionally weren't spoken or written in Walloon, in particular we are growing a list of articles about mushrooms that created the need to name in a precise way the different specias; strange as it may seem, there wasn't attested names for mushrooms (only a generic name "mushroom"); a side effect of the wikipedia has been the creation of Walloon names for a lot of mushrooms (from their French or latin names). Also, the creation of articles and the hyperlinks between them have lead to the exploration of a lot of connex subjects, and the discovery of Walloon names for some plants or animals that were used only locally in some places, and the rehabilitation/revival of those names; something that we wouldn't have thought about if it weren't for the fact of putting [[ and ]] around some terms (for example, an apple everybody knows what it is, there wasn't much thinking about it before; but from the startting of the article about apples, there is a list of apples species, and then we realize there is actually a lot to learn and to say about apples, about their history, their cultivation, their use in culinary preparations, etc)
Wikipedia is indeed a very powerfull tool; in the specific case of Walloon (and probably that can be the case too for most minorized languages) it is the *best* tool existing.
Wikipedia for a nation of 500 thousand to, say, 5 million seems to be the best way of writing an encyclopedia in their language. And even if the English WP fails, that will not mean the idea is all wrong for every language on the Earth.
Even if English fails (because of unsustainable traffic, that seems the greates problem for en:) other wikipedias, and particularly small ones, can still continue to exist; the Walloon wikipedia ran on my own server for the first months of it existance, and if the wikimedia hosting should collapse some day for whatever reason (something I hope will never happen) I will move it to somewhere else, but it wouldn't die; it is a too valuous thing for us.