First of all, I do not speak English very well. I am from Brazil.
Both "Brazilian culture of copyright infringment" and "I imagine the wider Wikipedia community will have to regularly audit them for compliance." sound to me very offensive. I believe that the wider Wikipedia community has to regularly audit the wider Wikipedia. And this is all.
In the early days, pt.wiki was poor documented. Pt.wiki was Portuguese club for almost 3 years. I believe that Brazilians do not felt welcome. Portuguese and Brazilian ways of communicating, asking, answering, etc. are different. These things possibly triggered disputes. But we have to forget this past, because the reality now is other.
Rationally speaking as Jimbo demanded, I think that the pt_br.wiki is unnecessary: - pt_br (Brazilian) and pt_pt (European) are less different than American and British English are; - pt.wiki welcome all the variants of Portuguese. It is not allowed to change anything from one variant to another; - There are 18 Brazilians for each one Portuguese in the world. Brazilians WTFly crazily invaded orkut, fotolog and most the blogs. Quickly, Brazil will overrun pt.wikipedia. The portuguese people are the ones who should be worried, but they are not. - The most important: Brazil and Portugal governments are trying to unify pt_br and pt_pt. Some small countries are already using this unified Portuguese. Soon there will be only one Portuguese Language.
There is absolutely no chance of splitting the pt.wiki. It makes no sense at all.
e2m
Em Thu, 19 Aug 2004 11:00:50 +1000, Tim Starling ts4294967296@hotmail.com escreveu:
Felipe Sanches wrote:
Wikipedia new language request. There are 182.1 million people in Brazil who use Brazilian Portuguese as their main language. Brazilian Portuguese IS NOT the same as Portuguese (domain pt.wikipedia.org) and it still isn't on the list (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_language_wikis_available)
I'm worried that this might be just another aspect of the old nationalistic dispute that's been raging on pt for many months. We've had a Brazilian admin continually recreating a deleted article, and eventually getting frustrated and abusing his admin powers. He was de-sysopped by me. And the Portuguese admins report being constantly attacked for trying to uphold site-wide policy.
One of the Portuguese admins told me that the cause of the dispute is a Brazilian culture of copyright infringment. A Brazilian contributor would copy and paste from another website, and a Portuguese admin would delete it. Some of the Brazilian contributors apparently framed this as a nationalistic dispute, as if Portugal was trying to exert control over its former colony.
If we did have a Brazilian Portuguese wiki, it should be made very clear to them that all content must be public domain or legally licensed under GFDL. I imagine the wider Wikipedia community will have to regularly audit them for compliance.
-- Tim Starling