Hello!
I would like to make some comments about the first message from Felipe Sanches.
Filipe Sanches proposes the creation of a Brazilian Portuguese Wikipedia because in his view, Brazilian Portuguese is not the same language as the one used in the Portuguese language wikipedia.
The Portuguese wikipedia (pt.wikipedia.org) is not the wikipedia of european portuguese language nor the wikipedia of Portugal. It's the wikipedia of all the speakers of the Portuguese language. One of founders of pt.wikipedia.org is Rodrigo Nishino from Brazil.
We now have a growing community of users from Portugal and Brazil and at least one user from Mozambique. We have a neutral policy and everybody can write in its own flavour of the Portuguese language. We have articles in the Brazilian flavour of the language and article in the European flavour of the language. We developed rules to prevent conflicts between Brazilian and Portuguese users:
1. Edits that change an article from a flavour to another are prohibited unless more than 50% of the content of article is improved. 2. Articles can't be moved from a title prevalent in one flavour to a title prevalent in another. 3. When an article has two possible titles both are mentioned in the first sentence of the article. 4. Words unfamiliar to one of the sub-communities may have a link to a entry in the wiktionary.
I hope we will soon implement a new rule that allows changes to a more neutral language every time a word or expression causes conflicts. In summary, we applied the neutral point of view to our problem.
Conflicts are usually caused by newcomers that are not familiar with the rules of the community. Most of the time, troublemakers are people with no intention to contribute to the project, but want to make a political statement. Ironically they may be Brazilians complaining that wikipedia.pt is mainly Portuguese and Portuguese complaining that the wikipedia.pt is too much Brazilian. Some of them want to fork because they want a wikipedia to represent the point of view of Brazilians or the point of view of the Portuguese. They clearly don't understand that the neutral point of view is inegotiable. They would have to fork from the Wikipedia Community and not only from the pt.wikipedia.
There are of course, people with good intentions that want to fork. But they are, for the moment, a small minority.
In my opinion, forking is, for the moment, a bad option from the point of view of any well intentioned wikipedian. In the Portuguese speaking world, conventional encyclopaedias (commercial encyclopaedias) are written in a neutral flavour of the language that is pleasant both to the Brazilians and to the Portuguese. That's precisely the flavour of the language that must be adopted by an encyclopaedia writer. A neutral flavour is also the most adequate to an encyclopaedia.
Additionally, the pt.wikipedia is still a weak community. A large number of users still need to absorb some of the most fundamental wikipedia policies like the neutral point of view and the copyright issues. And we have only about 13 000 articles, most of them stubs or incomplete articles. A fork would produce two smaller and even weaker communities. Our common resources would be wasted in a duplication of efforts.
JoaoMiranda
On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 12:41:12 -0700 (PDT), leercontainer-wikimedia@yahoo.com leercontainer-wikimedia@yahoo.com wrote:
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 13:40:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com
<snip> > >--- Felipe Sanches <felipe.sanches@gmail.com> 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
In Norway there are two official forms of written norwegian (bokm�l ~90% and nynorsk ~10%) that I suppose differ more than br_pt and pt_pt judging from the comments here on the list. In addition there is one (perhaps two) "unofficial" conservative form also in use(riksm�l), especially by one of the first and most active contributors (Wolfram). We have had some long and "disruptive" discussions and and I suspect that new contributors /might/ have been turned off by the dominant form bokm�l being used on the interface and on almost all articles.
Recently a new contributor has been wary of the dominance of bokm�l and wanted to start a new nynorsk wikipedia, which has also been done, just like that! http://nn.wikipedia.org
the discussions that ensued before and after have resulted in me making this (roughly translated) policy, which nobody has disagreed with yet (the most active users in the discussion have agreed):
1 Articles on the norwegian Wikipedia can be written in any currently active form of norwegian. 2 Since Wikipedia is a [[wiki]], anyone ''can'' change the language form of an article, it should then be up to this user to: 2.1 Change the language form of the whole article in one operation. 2.2 Move the article to a new name if needed. 2.3 Not do this to provoke or harm the work of others. 2.4 Communicate the content as good or better than before.
It is quite finished yet, I found some errors now, but I think this will prevent the balkanization of the Norwegian Wikipedia.
--Dittaeva
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