Mark Williamson wrote:
On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 07:37:19 +0100, Angela
<beesley(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:20:37 -0700, Mark
Williamson <node.ue(a)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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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". :-)
Ec