Hi, I suppose this is a mail that Brian can answer (nooo ... don't kill me ... I know you are overloaded with work).
On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people talk.
Now as much as I understand the namespace manager could help us in that.
We could create namespaces for:
*standardised Neapolitan *phonetic Neapolitan (at the moment, this would have the majority of articles at the moment) *language A (attributed to the NAP language group) *language B (attributed to the NAP language group) etc.
The mainpage would then become a page that leads to the several namespaces where the NAMESPACE:Main_page would actually hold the main page of that specific namespace and that could be different according to contents etc.
So is the namespace manager made for such an approach? If yes, this really helps us a lot since we do not need a single wikipedia for each of these languages, we do not need to have more than one or two persons to contribute to a language and this way these few people can start to create contents and others will follow by time. It would not delude people who join the projects just to be able to work in their language and then see the possibility denied, since very often it is easier to decide on a local level if something is to be considered "so different" to be a separate language or just a local variety that should go into the phonetic part (for example this would be the case for "Maiorese, the Neapolitan spoken in Maiori - it is different from Neapolitan of Naples, but it is easy to be understood by Neapolitans ... it is just a different way to pronounce words, but not having a standardised way of writing you can imagine that people from Maiori write a different Neapolitan than people from Naples).
Another advantage of having groups of languages on one wiki is that organising and administration becomes more effective and less time consuming - this does not mean that we should merge big wikis (this would be problematic- there are already too many edits to really be able to really check everything) - but wikis of a certain "language group region" or maybe languages with different writing standards (like nds for example) there it would make sense.
Well I need to answer an e-mail of the Neapolitan discussion group and therefore it would be helpful to know if this was possible or not.
Thanks!!!
Best, Sabine
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