"You've repeatedly pointed out that you don't want to spend the time, money, or effort to create and maintain wikis without any active participants, yet you insist that the Wikimedia Foundation does so. You haven't really made a case for why, except that these languages exist and have speakers. I don't think anyone debates those points; I also don't think that "a language exists" has "there should be a Wikimedia wiki for it" as a necessary consequent."
How much money does it cost to create a new Wiki? Technical efforts aside (and Tim Starling seems entirely willing to give technical assistance to Wikipedias for living natural languages), there is very little wrong.
You are exaggerating this very much, and perhaps you should also check http://bloglines.com/public/inactivewikipedias . Your allegations that I don't want to spend the time on these things are pure crap because I already spend time on them - for the last few days I have closely been monitoring the activity on every single one of these Wikipedias, and I don't mind it one bit.
If somebody does something bad, I can revert it; if it becomes a problem I can't handle, I can bring it up with a developer or steward or whomever it would be appropriate to bring it up with.
As to being upset that nobody cares about your language, from what I have learned the usual reaction is quite the opposite - in the time I have been monitoring inactive Wikipedias, I have seen ne.wikipedia become active, in a good way, and although I am not sure it is permanent, I think it's good. Also, take for example ka.wikipedia. The sysops there now, Malafaya and Sopho, found it through a search engine and when they saw it had 0 content, they decided to remedy that.
And what on earth are you talking about, a "scholarly resource"? When did I argue that inactive Wikipedias were scholarly resources? The only time I ever brought up anything of the sort was in regards to the Gothic Wikipedia (it looks dismal now, but I have after-holidays commitments from a few people), in which case I did not say "Oh golly gee, I know this Wikipedia will have two articles and 0 users, but somehow I think it'd be a scholarly resource anyways", what I said was basically that, if it accumulated a large number of articles, it would be a scholarly resource of sorts because it would be such a large corpus. Note the "large corpus" and "large number of articles".
I think that your views are extremely Draconian and such extreme measures are not needed at this point, the benifits are not outweighed by the risks with the current solution.
I think that - and I am serious here - you have a real problem with minority languages.
Mark
On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:26:20 -0500, Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org wrote:
On Wed, 2004-24-11 at 08:51 -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
I agree, however apparently there is some reason (which I do not yet fully comprehend) that we must be very careful with Wikipedias in different languages.
I think the big thing to understand is that each wiki takes time, effort, and money to maintain. Each wiki is a security risk, both technically and legally; an active community can offset this risk as well or better than fancy technological security measures.
An analogy: leaving the door to your house unlocked when you're having a backyard barbecue is the right thing to do. There's lots of people around, and they'll need to get in and out, and there's little risk of problems. It'd be really inconvenient to have to keep locking and unlocking it. Leaving the door unlocked when you are the only one home is probably OK. Leaving your door unlocked when no one is home is asking for trouble.*
A wiki without an active user community is an unlocked house with no one home.
You've repeatedly pointed out that you don't want to spend the time, money, or effort to create and maintain wikis without any active participants, yet you insist that the Wikimedia Foundation does so. You haven't really made a case for why, except that these languages exist and have speakers. I don't think anyone debates those points; I also don't think that "a language exists" has "there should be a Wikimedia wiki for it" as a necessary consequent.
Even if the disadvantages are low, the advantages of having empty, unused wikis don't seem to outweigh them. I find it hard to believe that, say, gv: is a huge source of pride for Manx speakers. If that was my native language, I'd think to myself, "Man, nobody really gives two shakes about us, do they?" And the idea that any unused Wikimedia wiki is a scholarly resource for the language is absurd. I guess there's a intellectual exercise in reading the list of ISO 639 codes, seeing which ones don't already have a Wikipedia, looking up the language, and then making a request on this list, but... I don't think that gratification is enough to offset the disadvantages.
So apparently every single language or dialect has to go before the board and waste their time...
I'd say that having a clear set of rules about how and when to start a Wikimedia wiki would obviate the need for a Board vote on each one. Like, I dunno, say: having a single person step forward willing to work on the wiki in the language, and maybe having one edit per 30 or 60 days. That seems like a pretty low threshold to me.
~ESP
- In some cities and countries. In other places, it's perfectly OK to
leave your door unlocked when you're not home.
-- Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org
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