In addition, Robin Patterson recently made 3 new sysops and 1 new bureaucrat without any vote.
New sysops were: Gangleri, Prevert, Rocastelo; the new bureaucrat was Vardion.
According to http://mi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Administrators , Rocastelo and Prevert are both in Galicia, which is in Spain, far removed from New Zealand. It appears that the changes they make are almost exclusively wikifying, adding categories, images, templates, and other things that would imply they do not know _any_ Maori.
The same page says that Robin Patterson can recognise only "a couple of hundred Maori words" and "can create short sentences" -- I can list 16 Maori words myself, and recognise quite a bit more (probably between 50 and 100).
It also says that A Pakeha, another admin, "[does] not speak, or read Maori"; Gangleri is as many will know a German born in Romania, he does not make any claim as to his ability but he is much more active on the German, Romanian, Esperanto, and English Wikipedias.
Perl, as some will know, got all the Maori he knew from a dictionary (or so it is said). The other sysops, Vardion and Steven Cope, don't make any claims either way.
Mark
On 13/07/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but the mainpage on the Nahuatl Wikipedia has Nahuatl at the very top, you have to scroll to see Spanish content.
I would not encourage the addition of non-Nahuatl content to the Nahuatl Wikipedia, especially by a prominent user such as yourself, but I don't think it needs to be deleted unless it's 1) a long page or 2) one of many.
Also, the Nahuatl Wikipedia is written mostly in Nahuatl -- no obnoxious notes at the beginning and end of all pages, no commented translations (well, very few; I removed many months back since a Nahuatl version existed), instead of having a sentence in Nahuatl and then 3 or 4 sentences in English, most articles are Nahuatl-only stubs.
The sentences are so short that the quality of the Nahuatl is virtually guaranteed.
However, none of this is true with the Maori Wikipedia.
If you show me a Wikipedia that has a site notice in the "wrong language" for a purpose other than correcting display problems (see many Indian languages), I will be very surprised (this of course excludes mi.wiki).
The most recent Wikis to become active -- Armenian, Georgian, Maltese, Friulian... all became active ONLY after *I* /translated the TOC/. This attracts people better than a website only in English that says "Add something here", or something that has an English-language sentence as the first sentence of a page and places English very prominently.
In the past, of course, languages have surely become active with prior text in the "right" language, but I think it takes a more motivated person. There are no recent examples of this; I think most of the larger Wikipedias probably had this though.
Yet, the fact that only Wikipedias for which I translated the ToCs have become active recently is, I think, a testament to the importance of native-language content presence. Surely, the Navajo Wikipedia, with its medium-quality Navajo used thruought, will be more appreciated than the Maori Wikipedia, with its medium-quality Maori mixed frequently with English.
I would like to close this letter by reminding you --and everybody else -- that Maori is not Robin Patterson's first language, __AND HE HIMSELF CLAIMS TO *NOT* BE FLUENT__.
Yet, this is my situation with Navajo, and that Wikipedia is mostly the fruit of my labour (as with mi.wiki, Rocastelo is a primary contributor, however he has mostly added interwikis and images rather than actual Navajo-language content), yet I have written none of it in English (granted, I did not translate the entire interface, but much of it is translated, and there is no English on the pages).
Robin Patterson has not deleted entire pages added by others in English, and in most cases he has not made an attempt to translate them. I also don't see why the note has to be *at the top of the mainpage* in English, and *in the site notice* -- Robin Patterson's reason is that 80% of all Maori speak English, and similar reasons. This points to a Wikipedia for a peoples or a culture rather than a language --- why is it a concern what percent of Maori _people_ speak English, if it's a Wikipedia for the Maori _language_?
Would a Maori speaker who is a primary speaker of English agree with the primary postition of English on the Maori Wikipedia? No, Maori is the language in all contexts where it would be expected: Te marae, te iwi... even people who don't speak Maori will try in the marae.
Mark
On 13/07/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/11/05, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
Māori is certainly not the only Wikipedia doing this. http://kn.wikipedia.org/ also has English in its site notice and that project has many native speakers of Kannada and is about to reach 1000 articles. http://gu.wikipedia.org and others do the same. The Arabic village pump contains an English introduction, and the early discussion in the project was mostly English (http://ar.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project:%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%86/%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B4%D9%8A%D9%81&oldid=10984).
Thank you for pointing this out. The Nahuatl wikipedia likewise has a good bit of both Spanish and English. (you can see the 100th "article" here, just a Spanish stub: http://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaloc ; I imagine node would argue for deleting or blanking it, but I only added interlanguage links to highlight the existence of much better Spanish content. Eventually a "needs translation" tag should be devised. [when was the first such tag used on en?] )
Every small project grows and finds initial contributors in its own way; I'm not sure it would be wise to impose some universal rules on how new languages should go about this.
This debate about whether non-local (english, french, spanish) content should be allowed to help seed new articles feels a lot like the debates about whether or not to allow substubs to exist. I find both types of seed content useful for small projects.
-- ++SJ
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