On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 11:57:42 -0700, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
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.
The big problem here is that it's neither of these two people who are carrying the advocacy. Both supports appear passive. These people are likely to write a few very good articles, but they are not the people who are likely to carry on to make the wiki operational for other Friulian speakers. I would feel much warmer to the idea if this request were being made by a Friulian speaker. Often if you ask someone whether they would be willing to help with a project you will get a very polite yes, but that does not easily translate into real work.
That brings up another thing. What's the big problem if we have a nearly empty Wikipedia for a while? How much space does that take up? As long as we aren't having heaps of requests to such a degree that we need a screening process so that we don't end up with 300 new Wikipedias by the end of the year, what's the huge problem?
As Andre noted, Friulian is a natural language with thousands of native speakers. There is no practical reason to not create a Friulian Wikipedia, at least not that I can think of.
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.
Mark, how many articles have you contributed to either of these?
Why do you ask? To the Sardinian Wikipedia, I did the mainpage and fixed some minor things in the few articles that were created by others. If I spoke Sardinian myself, there would no doubt be at least 30 articles by now and probably more.
To the Sicilian Wikipedia, I've not actually created content although I have provided constant support to Giuseppe d'Angelo.
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.
I don't particularly think that the 5 contributor proposal is the best. If they are all passive it will still get nowhere. Having even just one person who is both willing and able to do the work goes a lot further, especially if that person has a proven track record in one of the other wikis, perhaps even sysop experience. And even so that should be the person making the request, not Mark.
Note Andre's statistics:;
"Looking at the statistics (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansContributors.htm), I find only 6 Wikipedia languages with 5 contributors in the first month of their 'real' existence: en, he, fa, ast, be and tokipona. In the second month this was reached by de, pl, fi, bg, ro, uk, ur. For all other Wikipedias there was more difference between the time of their first and their fifth user, although in reality there may be some more because there might be non-registered users as well."
If we were to adopt a policy as severe as WikiTravel's, or even more severe as you are advocating, we might be without some of our largest Wikipedias.
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.
What fraction of the world's English speaking population is currently involved in the en:Wikipedia or any other English language sister project?
How is that relevant? We are talking about "potential contributors".
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.
Far more than speak Friulian.
How is that relevant? What I'm saying is that kn.wikipedia was preexisting, and that it only had one or two people when it got off the ground.
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.
Educated Friulians also speak Italian. Educated Karnatakans also speak English.
And educated French people often speak English. Do you advocate that we get rid of the French Wikipedia? I certainly don't.
And how are they to know if there are already two people who would be interested in the creation of such a Wikipedia?
By discussing it with the people they know.
I meant, two people who have already supported it.
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.
These "restrictions" are designed to promote the idea that a new wiki should have a chance to succeed.
Regardless of what they're designed to do, they do exactly the opposite. See again Andre's statistics.
But if we pursue such a policy, I do believe a fork with more liberal policies regarding multilingualism is in order
What makes you think that the operators of this hypothetical fork will not face the same problems?
What problems? What problems are preventing us from adding languages like Friulian just because somebody requests them, especially when we have (sometimes inactive) Wikipedias for Klingon, Latin, Sanskrit (it has native speakers now though), Toki Pona, Lojban, Occidental?
Do you mean the problem of people objecting to the creations of new Wikipedias? That would easily be solved by a pre-existing policy that allowed for more liberal multilinguistic activity.
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.
You absolutely have that right, but I doubt that it will go beyond "consider". :-)
And I'm sure it _will_ go beyond "consider". In fact, I am currently searching for a host for the project, and if I can't find somebody who can host it for free, then I will spend my own money on good hosting for it because this is something that matters to me.
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