Pablo:
Thank you very much for your information. Where can I find the technical details about setting up the mediawiki software?
I also remember that somewhere on the list someone mentioned they started something on Wikicities to test out the feasibility of a new language Wikipedia and then apply to move to the main Wikipedia. What is the policy of Wikicities and how possible is it to test out a project over there? Can anyone help?
Felix Wan
On Thu, February 24, 2005 5:54 am, Pablo Saratxaga said:
Kaixo!
On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 06:24:44PM -0800, Felix Wan wrote:
Mark, once again I appreciate your support. I don't think we will get the blessing of the community to start a Cantonese Wikipedia soon, but it does not mean that it cannot be done later.
My advice will be that you (or someone else interested in a Cantonese wikipedia) just get the mediawiki software and install it on a server somewhere to try out, so it can be seen if the project is viable or not; if it is, then moving it to wikipedia servers would be no problem, if it is not, at least we will know.
That is how Min-nan and Walloon wikipedias started; for the Walloon one, I wasn't myself sure it would work or not, that was actually the reason why I tried it on my own machine first; and I had almost given up after 2-3 months, when someone else appeared and revived it. When there were some 1.000 articles moving it to wikipedia was no problem (even in the extreme case were the database couldn't be imported, copying the articles by hand wouldn't be an impossible task either). Yes, the Walloon wikipedia is still small, and will continue to be small, as the total population of speakers is small (about 600.000) and there is absolutely no official support for the language nor any presence on mass media; however, with some 1.000 articles a year it is a valuable source of information, particularly about Walloon and Wallonia related topics (articles about language grammar, personalities, villages, rivers, existing and past litterature, etc), and the number of users is still growing, slowly, but growing, which means there is interest in it.
What I mean is, for a first try, when only limited traffic will happen, even hosting it on a private adsl connection is enough, a small computer with a standard GNU/Linux distribution is able to run the software; so while there is need of some consensus and approval to be hosted by the wikimedia foundation and use its infrastructure; anybody can start its own wikipedia-like server at home. And then, depending on the results, an official merging with wikipedia could be asked.
-- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga
http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]