On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 01:59:07 -0400, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: This would be a nice example to be able to point to. --Sj (The fact that this is already true for tokipona, is not nearly as interesting)

Tim Starling wrote: Could you provide an estimate in the number of work hours? Either more could be done in automating parts of the task, or the required work on your behalf could be paid for with money that has to be collected by the community (of Klingon speakers, say) before the new wiki can be set up. As a consultant, I have found that a good way to avoid boring work tasks is to put a price tag on them. Oh yes, I would love to fix your spelling errors -- at $10 per page or $150 per hour. :-) The current discussions of whether or not to start new projects are tiresome and frustrating for all parties. It would be better to allow anybody to start new projects, so that the hard part will not be convincing the Wikimedia Foundation, but convincing the community to fill the new wiki with contents. Perhaps such communities should be required first to collect 250 articles (off-wiki, by e-mail) and when this is achieved, the new wiki will be started. Lars Aronsson, lars(a)aronsson.se -- Aronsson Datateknik

The difference here Tim is that while Klingon is 1. a conlang with a fairly small number of speakers intended as the language of an imaginary alien race from a scifiseries 2. afaik completely without native speakers altogether, save maybe a handful, while Gothic is a natural language with perhaps 4000~5000 speakers, the only well-known East Germanic language and as such very important to linguistic reasearch (the others ie Vandalic and Burgundian are known only from proper names), a language with its own unique and beautiful (well at least I think it is) alphabet, and has a (though not clustered in the same neighbourhood, city, or even country as most such movements are) revival movement going to teach the language to children as a native language with (supposedly) upwards of 400 children so far. In the near future it is forseeable that these 400 children (and probably teens too by now; I think this started in the 80s or something) will be ready to use an encyclopedic resource which they would benifit a great deal more from if it were in Gothic; then what about *their* kids if they are raised in Gothic as well? This could eventually lead to upwards of 10000 native gothic speakers (perhaps up to 2 million if the movement eventually finds a geographical location they can use as a gothic-only environment) in the foreseeable future. Latin, however, (ttbomk) has no such movement (which is surprising, in the very least), and the chances that somebody will be able to read Latin sufficiently better than any other language with an extant Wikipedia are fairly low (Latin has other justifications though I believe). Of course its still up to you to decide whether or not you'll ultimately be OK with supporting such a language or not, but I do hope you'll reconsider. best, node On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 12:23:03 +1000, Tim Starling <ts4294967296(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

Mark Williamson wrote: I'm aware of their differences, but neither can be justified in terms of the reasons I work on this project. I'm just not interested in supporting linguistic research. I'm happy to leave it to other people as long as they don't waste my time. We can talk about that offlist. Suffice to say that there are certain dev tasks you *would* have to do. -- Tim Starling

Mark Williamson wrote: I already said what my reasons for working on this project are, and I'm not required to justify them to you. You're welcome to learn how to write language files, obtain shell access and CVS access, and add all the languages the community will tolerate. But don't tell me how I should be spending my time. I agree with Delirium, who wrote: : ...I can't seriously see people using the Gothic Wikipedia as a : source of general encyclopedia-type information. If you want to know : some random fact (say, the biography of Charlemagne), why would anyone : look for it in a Gothic-language encyclopedia? I think that's an important point. I think your assertion that parents will teach their children Gothic as a first language is ridiculous. In fact I sincerely hope they don't. There's a difference between language preservation and language revival, and I'm not ashamed about supporting one but not the other. No doubt linguistics is an interesting field, but there are lots of interesting fields and I can't get involved in all of them. There are 16 people with shell access, and any one of them can do what I'm suggesting. I suggest you go and bug one of them instead of wasting your time interrogating me about my motives. -- Tim Starling

When did I say parents *will* teach their children Gothic as a first language? Plenty already have. What's important to remember is that while in Western Europe, Gothic died quite some time ago, in the Crimea, Gothic died perhaps around the same time as Cornish did, or maybe even later, in Cornwall. And we have a Cornish Wikipedia... --node

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:22:04 +1000, Tim Starling <ts4294967296(a)hotmail.com> wrote: Theoretically, it is treated as a separate language although essentially it is more of a dialectal variety (they're very very close). Apparently there are sources available in the Ukraine (or so I have been told) with more information about Crimean Gothic which supposedly survived into the late 1800s in some rural agrarian communities; the letter you speak of is the only one readily accessible from Western European libraries I believe. Then there is also Gotlandic. Sweden and Denmark both say it is a dialect of their respective national languages, but many Gotlanders claim that Gotlandic is an East Germanic language descended directly from (ie the modern offspring of) the Gothic language. How valid this is, I am not sure. No, no, not really. All that is known about Gothic ("western gothic" rather than "ancient gothic" might be more appropriate) comes from 1. Wulfilas' translation of the bible (which you mentioned), 2. A great deal of religious commentaries and the like, and 3. A few legal contracts written in the language. However that is only counting the known documents in Gothic that are written *in the Gothic script* presumed to have been invented by Wulfilas (some people believe it already existed), there is also apparently a large body of texts in a slightly modified fuþark alphabet (Nordic runic alphabet). No, I cannot provide a reference. But I do remember the movement was associated with an "M. Carver", and there were neologisms too ie for computer, email, electric bill, and the like. --node

Mark Williamson wrote: It's important for all of us to all remember that we are all volunteers, and "I don't feel like it" is always a valid reason for not doing anything at all. I share Tim's concerns about small wikis, and some more besides. For example, we don't have a big problem with wiki spam on large busy wikis, but it is a problem that is only going to grow worse, and small wikis without active communities will be ripe targets. There was a time when we tended to say yes (accidentally or otherwise) to just about every proposed language. But the simple fact of the matter is that we've already done all the easy cases of general interest, and the languages that we don't have are all going to need some scrutiny. I express no opinion on Gothic; I simply don't know enough to know. But I do make these observations... (1) while there appear to be somewhere between several hundred and several thousand speakers, to my knowledge *none* of those speakers use Gothic as their primary language or would have difficulty finding encyclopedia information in a language that they do understand (2) therefore, this is more of a linguistic research matter, so I wonder if perhaps what is really wanted is a wikibook type of place where speakers can share texts in the language, write texts in the language, write textbooks to help others learn the language, etc. The same argument could be given for other dead languages, but it's important to remember that we don't have to be consistent, when there are historical factors (historical to our project) involved. Reading about the moon landings in Latin is a fun curiosity, not a necessity for our project, and presumably the Latin wikipedia might have such a thing. --Jimbo

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: I know that that has a lot to do with what I do or don't do. Our richness in things to do goes beyond imagination. For as much as I may do I still leave many of my own projects incomplete. I can't say that I'm proud of that personal shortcoming, but it is heartening when someone takes up an idea of mine and develops it far beyond what I ever could have done. Being aware of that makes me a little more tolerant of the failings of others, but not less frustrated. The one big advantage they still have on the smaller wikis is that the "Recent changes" remains at a manageable size. That makes it easier for the regulars to spot something out of the ordinary like spam or vandalism. The audience should be one factor in any decision. Without an audience what's the point? There are still some significant languages without a wiki, and with a population that could be helped. (Singhalese, Hausa, Navajo, Quechua are examples from four different continents.) These might even be encouraged if there were an inkling of desire to participate. The community that speaks a dead or artificial language needs to exist beyond the walls of academia or Hollywood. There is plenty in the various existing projects to accomodate these languages: Grammar guides in Wikibooks, ancient texts in Wikisource, vocabulary entries in Wiktionary. It's difficult to justify a whole encyclopedia for a dead or constructed language that has done none of these. In the early days such a language proposal could be viewed more favorably because none of these other projects existed. Scaling the overall project involves balancing two extremes. If a project is too big it bureaucratizes itself. Rules and rule-making become ends in themselves for some parts of the community. The average contributor can't keep up with it in any kind of informed way. There are frequent votes to decide questions that only affect part of the community, and an old-timer who has gone off to deal with topics on another part of the pedia comes back to his old topic to find that it has been flooded with rules that make no sense to him. It becomes very difficult to re-open the debate in the face of a rule-bound opposition. New projects can offer new ways of looking at a situation; this is why I was moderately supportive of the new Wikispecies project. The way things are done on a new project where contributors can take the risks necessary for original development, with a reasonable chance of defending those risks is what will keep the wiki complex alive and in a state of dynamic growth. Proposals that impose a certain regimentation on an entire family of projects need to be resisted; such would be the case with any insistance that all Wiktionaries follow the same format for articles. The other extreme that scaling must face is the premature development of small projects, or ones with extremely limited growth potential. The idea of a separate project to deal with the chemical elements had limited growth potential because on a practical level the number of elements is finite. In theory that list could be expanded infinitely, but such a prospect within our lifetimes is not at all realistic. There also appear to be some efforts to create some communities based on an absence of effort by a small number of individuals to work together with others. The recent debate over separate traditional and simplified chinese wikipedias is a good example of this. Although the zh-tw Wikipedia was set up in error, the debate that followed did show us how incredibly difficult it can be to get the genie back in the bottle. Similar proposals have been made for separate German and Hebrew language Wikisources. I can understand where in the absence of technical expertise the request for a separate project for an RTL language would be sensible. The arguments for German, however, seem to focus on the concept of being able to work better in an environment in their own language. True as that may be it reflects an unwillingness to seek solutions to how to work together in a multilingual environment. The underlying texts in whatever language are stable, and the difficulties relate to meta-matters about how we discuss the treatment of those texts. How do we make the texts of one language more available to the readers of another? To me that is one of the fundamental questions that Wikisource should seek to address. Wikisource currently has a little less than 4,000 articles of which maybe 100 are German language texts. Considering that number is affected by having Bible and Book of Mormon entries on a one chapter = one article basis reduces the 4,000 significantly for independant articles. Synchrinized side-by-side edit boxes still remain just a dream. Ec

Mark Williamson wrote: See, these are the tiresome arguments that we have to hear over and over again for every little language or project idea. So much time and effort is wasted in this boring argumentation that could be better spent if you just started to write some 250 encyclopedic articles in Gothic and then said: "Here is what I have assembled on my own without any wiki. Could I please have a wiki so that my friends could help me in this project? My friends have collected these $500 to help it happen." Can you imagine how much more convincing that kind of argument is? This way, instead of fighting against the arguments of other wikipedians, you would have to fight against your own abilities. Current articles in Latin: 2648, Nynorsk: 528, Kashubian: 266, Toki pona: 190, Latvian: 137, Faroese: 51, Klingon: 47, Breton: 28. What if you cannot write 250 articles on your own? What if your friends cannot collect $500? Then what are your chances of ever writing an encyclopedia? What if the Wikimedia Foundation still would not accept your 250 Gothic articles and $500? To heck with them, run your own wiki! You've got the contents and the resources. You're strong. Be happy! Lars Aronsson, lars(a)aronsson.se -- Aronsson Datateknik

MW> If you were looking for "dead languages" and conlangs, that would MW> exclude Breton, Faroese, Latvian, Kashubian, and Nynorsk (Nynorsk is MW> basically an official codification of rural SW Norwegian speech forms, MW> it can hardly be considered a conlang). Kashubian is not a dead language. There are still many native speakers in Kashubia. -- Ausir mailto:fallout@lexx.eu.org http://fallout.scifi.pl ICQ 41090834 GG 2730728

Yes, that's what I was saying. "that would exclude". --node On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 14:11:19 +0200, Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote: Pawel wrote:

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 22:19:38 -0700 Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote: I disagree with your statement that Toki Pona "at the time of its creation was not controversial". I have spoken out my doubts BEFORE it was created, and major objections came in within _days_ of it being created - see timeline below. If there was no major objections before its creation, that was only because those against it: 1. Did not know there were any plans to create Tokipona, or 2. Assumed that objecting was not necessary to stop those plans. At the time several languages were proposed, and none had been created for quite a while. I was definitely with the second group. Andre Engels Timeline regarding Toki Pona: 31 March: Request by Sonia to start Toki Pona 1 April: Yours humbly says tokipona should get a 3- not a 2-letter code, and in this message writes: "[...] for me personally it's getting to the level where I doubt whether having it would be good at all." 4 April: Brion tells that Toki Pona, Ido and Tok Pisin have been created 4 April: Evan Podromou write: "On this subject: isn't the toki pona Wikipedia just going to have, like, 12 articles?" 5 April: Erik Moeller writes a rather long mail rejecting Toki Pona. Discussion starts between Erik attacking and Brion defending. 5 April: Erik proposes to remove Toki Pona and move it to the Unilang wiki 5 April: Erik adds another argument: Toki Pona is copyrighted

Delirium wrote: I didn't say that languages or groups with less money should be refused. All I said was that groups that can collect $500 (as I am sure that the Gothic language supporters can) are sure to get their wiki off the ground, with or without the Wikimedia Foundation. In a western country, an experienced IT contractor would charge something like $80 per hour for this kind of job and the estimate we were given was that six hours of work might be required. Thus, $500 is sure to cover the cost of paying someone to do the job. Alternatively, this amount is also enough to pay for hosting a website outside of Wikimedia for a year or two, depending on traffic volume. If you can collect $500 from your community, you are sure you can start a wiki of your own. You might be able to get away with less. But the amount $500 is sure to remove the counter-argument that time or money is insufficient. It boils down to: Do you want to argue for ever, or do you want your new wiki off the ground? I'm sure that Klingon, Latin and Gothic can collect $500, since they have many supporters in wealthy western economies. The community that started to build the Polish Wikipedia did start their own server (Rosetta, remember). That proved they were able to do it. With their smartness, I'm sure they managed with less than $500. When they decided to un-fork and rejoin Wikipedia, it wasn't because they had to, but because they wanted to. If there was any disagreement, they were negotiating from a position of strength. Lars Aronsson, lars(a)aronsson.se -- Aronsson Datateknik

Delirium wrote: Perhaps the Gothic writers could start off with Wikisource. Various technical issues could be worked out there (encoding, font, spelling). Just annotating the texts in Gothic could be a small, yet unprecedented (?) step toward more original writing.

Gerard Meijssen wrote: These are all excellent suggestions. The other thing that should be considered is a Gothic grammar in Wikibooks. These are all broad considerations that could go into establishing criteria for determining whether a dead language should have its own Wikipedia. The 1500 word minimum may be somewhat arbitrary, but the principle is good. I would even say that it does not have to be in "one" wiktionary, but it could be the total of all Gothic words in all Wiktionaries. I'm not at all supporting the premature establishment of a uniquely Gothic Wiktionary. Ec