The Toki Pona language was constructed by Sonja Kisa. Sonja Kisa is also User:Sonjaaa and the primary instigator of the Toki Pona Wikipedia. Toki Pona is not an officially recognized language anywhere. Now the Toki Pona Wikipedia is effectively not an encyclopedia, but a language development wiki for the TP language.
So, where do we stop? A few years ago I scribbled down the beginnings of an artificial language somewhere. Can I have my own Wikipedia, too? Yeah, it's not really complete, but I can develop it as I go along, right? There are 133 Google hits on Sonja Kisa's name. There are 13,100 hits on my name. Heck, there are only 894 hits on "Toki Pona" and Google thinks I misspelled "Toki Ona" (whatever that is). I bet I could push an artificial language I create to 5,000 hits within a couple of months.
I realize that Brion is a fan of languages, and since he sets up those wikis he pretty much decides what is acceptable. Shouldn't those languages undergo some basic public approval process first, though, so that we can determine whether there is really any value in creating them? In my opinion, Wikipedia should not be a promotional vehicle for other people's pet projects.
To me, it matters not whether a language is artificial or whether it has naturally developed over hundreds of years. It does matter, however, how many speakers there are, and if we can realistically create a complete and accurate encyclopedia with that number of speakers. I'd say a minimum of 10,000 active speakers is a requirement for creating an encyclopedia. Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that requirement.
But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation as a serious project. When a professional historian reads our article about the Holocaust, and there's a "Klingon" link right next to Japanese, that might be seriously off-putting. Especially if there's also Tolkien's Elvish, and maybe some language from the Buck Rogers universe. I'm sure the furries also have their own languages.
IMHO this puts us into a similar realm as the micronations, of which there are also thousands. Creating Wikipedias for all these unused languages is like formally acknowledging them. Furthermore, this will bleed into all other Wikimedia projects.
I'd prefer it if these languages were developed on separate wikis, until they have a meaningful number of active speakers. And I also think the decision whether to start a particular language should be made by the community.
Regards,
Erik
On Apr 4, 2004, at 21:26, Erik Moeller wrote: [snip]
I realize that Brion is a fan of languages, and since he sets up those wikis he pretty much decides what is acceptable. Shouldn't those languages undergo some basic public approval process first, though, so that we can determine whether there is really any value in creating them? In my opinion, Wikipedia should not be a promotional vehicle for other people's pet projects.
The value of a Wikipedia project wiki comes in several ways:
First, there's the long-term goal of being a useful informational resource for the public.
Second, there's the short-term enjoyment we Wikipedians get from working on the project.
Third, there's spill-over in getting people involved. Grabbing people's interest for one project can get them interested in another one, or more generally in the Free/Open Source ideals.
Certainly there are people who have derided the existence of the Esperanto-language Wikipedia, but having it has brought a number of people to Wikipedia in general, such as myself, who might not have been called to it otherwise. I started patching the old UseMod wiki to better support Esperanto and Unicode, and ended up pretty much maintaining the software and server config.
Will an Esperanto-language Wikipedia really educate lay readers in the future better? Maybe, maybe not. But as a recruiting tool it's certainly been a success, and I'd rather not begrudge that chance to others.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion-
Certainly there are people who have derided the existence of the Esperanto-language Wikipedia,
Esperanto has an estimated number of 2 million speakers. That is larger than many tribal cultures or ethnic groups which have their own language, and far greater than the proposed 10,000 speaker requirement. It is the most widely accepted artificial language. It is therefore hardly a valid comparison to Toki Pona or Klingon.
I'm all for people enjoying themselves and working on Wikipedia because of that, however, as with everything, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis. And there is certainly a cost associated with letting every pet language have its own Wikipedia.
Per enjoyment alone, we should probably set up a big-ass Wikimedia gameserver, that would certainly attract thousands of possible Wikipedia recruits. (No, I am *not* suggesting that we do so.)
Regards,
Erik
On Apr 4, 2004, at 21:50, Erik Moeller wrote:
Brion-
Certainly there are people who have derided the existence of the Esperanto-language Wikipedia,
Esperanto has an estimated number of 2 million speakers. That is larger than many tribal cultures or ethnic groups which have their own language, and far greater than the proposed 10,000 speaker requirement. It is the most widely accepted artificial language. It is therefore hardly a valid comparison to Toki Pona or Klingon.
There are also many endangered languages with *fewer* speakers than there are active speakers of Toki Pona or Klingon. Getting _them_ to put together some encyclopedia material in their native languages would probably earn somebody a nice PhD in linguistics or anthropology, and would be very very worthy of our support.
The idea of a 10,000-speaker limit is absolutely abhorrent, and I can only assume you haven't thought it through. Arbitrary limits are inappropriate.
I'm all for people enjoying themselves and working on Wikipedia because of that, however, as with everything, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis. And there is certainly a cost associated with letting every pet language have its own Wikipedia.
The cost is minor, and we've got plenty of "real languages" with fewer interested contributors (total speakers or not), with dozens of barely-scratched wikis already set up and unused. If you want to improve the signal/noise ratio, I humbly suggest you concentrate on boosting the signal. Putting down somebody else's effort isn't productive even if it is satisfying.
Per enjoyment alone, we should probably set up a big-ass Wikimedia gameserver, that would certainly attract thousands of possible Wikipedia recruits. (No, I am *not* suggesting that we do so.)
Capture-the-Troll? :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion-
There are also many endangered languages with *fewer* speakers than there are active speakers of Toki Pona or Klingon.
Well, considering Toki Pona has about a handful of "speakers" (none of which speak Toki Pona exclusively or even for a substantial amount of their time), I doubt that they would be worth including.
Getting _them_ to put together some encyclopedia material in their native languages would probably earn somebody a nice PhD in linguistics or anthropology, and would be very very worthy of our support.
Why? They can set up their own wiki (or use my affordable wiki hosting service). Wikipedia is about building an encyclopedia, not about earning PhDs in linguistics. You are entering original research territory here. Not everything that some people may consider worth doing is worth doing on Wikimedia's property.
The cost is minor,
I disagree. If we lose professionals because of our Elvish or Klingon factions, that is a major cost. If this whole multilanguage thing gets out of control, that is more and more likely to happen.
and we've got plenty of "real languages" with fewer interested contributors (total speakers or not), with dozens of barely-scratched wikis already set up and unused.
Most of the inactive wikis at least have the realistic potential to become highly active when the respective speaking population gains Internet access, and they can read whatever it is we produce (given a print edition).
If you want to improve the signal/noise ratio, I humbly suggest you concentrate on boosting the signal.
Concentrate, yes. Ignore the noise, no. We have to draw the line *somewhere*, and if you do not suggest an alternative to the 10,000 speaker requirement I have to presume that you want to draw it *nowhere*. The inclusion of Toki Pona sets a highly questionable precedent.
Regards,
Erik
I have no opinion on Toki Pona (It is well known I have no problem with original research on Wikipedia anyway). However, as respects dead languages which no one speaks, lets say Anglo-Saxon, or especially Native American languages with very few speakers, I think they are very very good if someone wants to do them. The only problem I see is having many (and paying for websites) which don't ever develop into anything.
Fred
From: erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller) Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: 05 Apr 2004 07:37:00 +0200 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Languages: crossing a border?
Concentrate, yes. Ignore the noise, no. We have to draw the line *somewhere*, and if you do not suggest an alternative to the 10,000 speaker requirement I have to presume that you want to draw it *nowhere*. The inclusion of Toki Pona sets a highly questionable precedent.
Erik Moeller wrote:
Brion-
There are also many endangered languages with *fewer* speakers than there are active speakers of Toki Pona or Klingon.
Well, considering Toki Pona has about a handful of "speakers" (none of which speak Toki Pona exclusively or even for a substantial amount of their time), I doubt that they would be worth including.
I don't know enough about Toki Pona to make an informed comment about this specific language, but I can certainly view the proponents of Klingon with benign condescension.
Getting _them_ to put together some encyclopedia material in their native languages would probably earn somebody a nice PhD in linguistics or anthropology, and would be very very worthy of our support.
Why? They can set up their own wiki (or use my affordable wiki hosting service). Wikipedia is about building an encyclopedia, not about earning PhDs in linguistics. You are entering original research territory here. Not everything that some people may consider worth doing is worth doing on Wikimedia's property.
I would view the PhD as merely an incidental benefit. Like Fred I'm not completely averse to original research, but I don't think that other-language Wikipedias necessarily means original research. The people with a direct interest in developing an endangered language Wikipedia may not be in a position to pay you for your "affordable" wiki hosting service. A supportive on-line community is sometimes a requirement to keep something going. The resource shortage is not just a financial one, but the paucity of speakers of the language also implies a shortage of intellectual resources for doing the work.
The cost is minor,
I disagree. If we lose professionals because of our Elvish or Klingon factions, that is a major cost. If this whole multilanguage thing gets out of control, that is more and more likely to happen.
Maybe we would lose some, but to say that those losses would be significant is entirely speculative. Far more are likely to look at the long list of languages with pride, even though they feel no need to visit what's happening in these other languages. Klingon may merit a shrug or a head-scratch, but it won't drive people away. Businesses and other enterprises grow by taking bold steps; Wikipedia's growth has come from taking bold and innovative steps, not by conservatively spending its energy protecting its past accomplishments. As a people's encyclopedia we let all sorts of people edit with no special status being granted to professionals. If a professional can't live with that, maybe he should leave.
If you want to improve the signal/noise ratio, I humbly suggest you concentrate on boosting the signal.
Concentrate, yes. Ignore the noise, no. We have to draw the line *somewhere*, and if you do not suggest an alternative to the 10,000 speaker requirement I have to presume that you want to draw it *nowhere*. The inclusion of Toki Pona sets a highly questionable precedent.
Some of us are flexible enough to live in communities where lines are never drawn. The passion that some people have for making rules probably drives more people away than our support for obscure languages.
Ec
Ray-
The people with a direct interest in developing an endangered language Wikipedia may not be in a position to pay you for your "affordable" wiki hosting service. A supportive on-line community is sometimes a requirement to keep something going.
If Wikimedia wants to provide charitable wiki hosting for worthwhile projects then we should explicitly make this part of our mission statement. Furthermore, if we want to do so, the respective wikis should be independent of the main Wikipedia project, or any Wikipedia project, and hosted on wikimedia.org instead, e.g.
tokipona.wikimedia.org klingon.wikimedia.org elvish.wikimedia.org
This prevents the "bleed-over" effect into other wiki projects, where we will inevitably get a Toki Pona Wikibooks, a Toki Pona Wikiquote etc., all of which would effectively be original research wikis.
Furthermore, any such charitably hosted wiki should be approved by the community at large.
Regards,
Erik
"BV" == Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com writes:
BV> The idea of a 10,000-speaker limit is absolutely abhorrent, BV> and I can only assume you haven't thought it BV> through. Arbitrary limits are inappropriate.
For Wikitravel, we have a 5-member limit. We have to have 5 people say that they'll work on the wiki, including one person to act as an initial admin and go-between to work with the rest of the Wikitravel community, before we start one.
~ESP
From: "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com
Certainly there are people who have derided the existence of the Esperanto-language Wikipedia, but having it has brought a number of people to Wikipedia in general, such as myself, who might not have been called to it otherwise. I started patching the old UseMod wiki to better support Esperanto and Unicode, and ended up pretty much maintaining the software and server config. Will an Esperanto-language Wikipedia really educate lay readers in the future better? Maybe, maybe not. But as a recruiting tool it's certainly been a success, and I'd rather not begrudge that chance to others.
Well said, Brion! I first found Wikipedia through a mention of the eo.wiki by Don Harlow I believe. And I've enjoyed so much being able to look up quite informative texts in Esperanto and other languages! The Interlingua wiki has grown too, by getting people interested and adding articles who perhaps may never have had the urge to translate or compose in this beautiful auxiliary and international language.
Not to get overly sappy or anything but I really appreciate everything you've done for the Wikipedia. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think appreciatively of all the help you've been, Brion, and so many others also, who are dedicated to keeping this project running, in the late nights, and during times when things go hay-wire. Thanks for keeping everything working so well for the benefit of so many.
With sincere thanks, Jay B. [[User:ILVI]]
Erik Moeller wrote:
The Toki Pona language was constructed by Sonja Kisa. Sonja Kisa is also User:Sonjaaa and the primary instigator of the Toki Pona Wikipedia. Toki Pona is not an officially recognized language anywhere. Now the Toki Pona Wikipedia is effectively not an encyclopedia, but a language development wiki for the TP language.
[...] There are 133 Google hits on Sonja Kisa's name. There are 13,100 hits on my name. Heck, there are only 894 hits on "Toki Pona" and Google thinks I misspelled "Toki Ona" (whatever that is). I bet I could push an artificial language I create to 5,000 hits within a couple of months.
It seems that you are working from (at least) two assumptions:
(1) It seems that you think your Google counts have some sort of significance or meaning. I think this assumption is dangerous to make. Especially your own assessment that you would be able to create 5,000 hits within a couple of months, should repel this myth easily. As for myself, I respect Toki Pona and believe that having a Wikipedia in it is OK; not because it has a high number of Google hits, but because I came across the language, found it interesting, and realised that it is a much more complete and serious conlang project than most other conlangs.
(2) You mentioned that people who come across the English (or any other major language) article on some popular topic, and see an "Elvish" or "Klingon" or "Toki Pona" link at the top in the "Other languages:" row, would take this as an indication that Wikimedia is not serious enough or has no credibility. This is your opinion that you are generalising to all (or most) people. Myself, I think most people would react in a more positive way: "Whee, they have a sense of humour too, just like Google." Speaking of which, according to your logic Google would not be taken seriously either because it has Klingon and h4x0r translations.
The important question here is whether or not the amount of people recruited as a result of this fun factor outweighs the amount of people driven away under the sentiment that Wikimedia is "not serious". Your assumption is that it doesn't, but this is open to speculation. Analogously, most people assume that Wiki wouldn't work because they think the amount of people who would vandalise and wreak havoc would outweigh the amount of dedicated volunteers who clean up after them. In that sense, we have already seen that these kinds of assumptions can be majorly wrong.
Shouldn't those languages undergo some basic public approval process first, though, so that we can determine whether there is really any value in creating them?
Yes, maybe we should. I'm pretty sure Toki Pona would make it.
Timwi
Timwi-
myself, I respect Toki Pona and believe that having a Wikipedia in it is OK; not because it has a high number of Google hits, but because I came across the language, found it interesting, and realised that it is a much more complete and serious conlang project than most other conlangs.
That's nice, but it effectively turns Wikimedia into a promotional agency for a language which doesn't have any active speakers yet. It is not our job to judge which languages are "worth learning" and set up projects so people can do so. We need to define objective criteria rather than subjective ones. The criteria Andre proposed seem reasonable.
Analogously, you might say we could have articles about persons on Wikipedia who have a high potential for doing something meaningful in their lives, in order to let people learn about it so they can get in touch. Of course we don't do that, because judging who has a potential for doing something is a highly subjective endeavor, and a promotional one to boot (and therefore POV).
(2) You mentioned that people who come across the English (or any other major language) article on some popular topic, and see an "Elvish" or "Klingon" or "Toki Pona" link at the top in the "Other languages:" row, would take this as an indication that Wikimedia is not serious enough or has no credibility. This is your opinion that you are generalising to all (or most) people. Myself, I think most people would react in a more positive way: "Whee, they have a sense of humour too, just like Google." Speaking of which, according to your logic Google would not be taken seriously either because it has Klingon and h4x0r translations.
That is an invalid comparison. Google is merely an indexing service which is not directly associated with the information it provides. We, on the other hand, are the direct providers of knowledge on a variety of highly sensitive subjects. Some of these are subjects which people kill over and die for, in other words, subjects people associate strong emotions with and do not like to see portrayed in a whimsical light. If you try to find out credible information about a terrorist attack in which you have lost one of your loved ones, for example, having Elvish or Klingon prominently featured at the top and the bottom of the article may immediately turn you away from the project, it may feel like a mockery of your pain. That reaction is not entirely irrational, furthermore, it is completely justifiable.
In addition, in Google's case, the language appears in a single list of UI translations, in this case, it would appear (if the projects are successful to any reasonable extent) on hundreds of pages in dozens of languages.
The important question here is whether or not the amount of people recruited as a result of this fun factor outweighs the amount of people driven away
Yes and no. You also have to look at the kind of people you will attract with any "fun project". It's not like we have a shortage of Tolkien fans. Again, if we just wanted high numbers, we could as well run a gameserver. There are lots of skript kiddies who have plenty of time at their hands.
Regards,
Erik
On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 12:05:00PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
Analogously, you might say we could have articles about persons on Wikipedia who have a high potential for doing something meaningful in their lives, in order to let people learn about it so they can get in touch. Of course we don't do that, because judging who has a potential for doing something is a highly subjective endeavor, and a promotional one to boot (and therefore POV).
Well I just shared my views with a person that he should probably publish his material elsewhere. He started to generate articles on his lifelong work about connections between mathematical vectors, sub-quark material, changed relativity theory of einstein and redical philosophy. Naturally nobody ever heard of that, and he haven't published it yet, but... look at the unimaginable possibility.
Not that I agree or disagree with people coming up with wild ideas, but I am strongly against using wikipedia as a free publishing and discussion body for original works. (This probably would include languages nobody speak [or heard of] but their author and her 18 friends.)
grin
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller@...> writes:
But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation as a serious project. When a professional historian reads our article about the Holocaust, and there's a "Klingon" link right next to Japanese, that might be seriously off-putting. Especially if there's also Tolkien's Elvish, and maybe some language from the Buck Rogers universe. I'm sure the furries also have their own languages.
Because whe are using the language links in the language of that language visitors will not see "Klingon" but "tlhIngan" (I do not think there is unicode support for the real Klingon glyphs http://www.kli.org/pics/piqdemo.gif )
And so for most if not all special languages I do not think anybody will be abel to identify them if the do not know the language already.
Walter
Walter Vermeir wrote:
Because whe are using the language links in the language of that language visitors will not see "Klingon" but "tlhIngan" (I do not think there is unicode support for the real Klingon glyphs http://www.kli.org/pics/piqdemo.gif )
This is off-topic, but -- Klingon enthusiasts prefer to use the Latin letters, and the pIqaD (I hope I spelt that right) are widely recognised as being unofficial and non-canon and therefore have little following.
Timwi
Erik Moeller wrote:
I'd say a minimum of 10,000 active speakers is a requirement for creating an encyclopedia. Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that requirement.
Does Latin meet that requirement? The aboriginal Sami minority in northern Sweden, Norway and Finland numbers 85,000 people and it is not clear to me whether they speak one language with six dialects or six different languages. Many wrongs have been done to these folks in history, and I think it is fair to assume that the same goes for many other language minorities throughout the world. It seems unnecessary to raise more artificial barriers.
If a Sami or Kashubian encyclopedia or one in Toki Pona is a really bad idea, it will die or fade away from its own failure, and the contributors cannot blame anyone else for their own failure.
But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation as a serious project.
If this is the problem, why not solve this problem. Split the lists in two or three different lists: Languages with more than 20K articles can be considered "useful" encyclopedias, languages with 1K-20K articles can be listed as "developing" encyclopedias, and languages with less than 1K articles are "experimental". Every big corporation or organization has "experimental" projects which can fail without risking the credibility of the whole.
Currently, eight languages have more than 20K articles (English, German, Japanese, French, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish). Another 26 languages have 1K-20K articles, including Esperanto, Chinese, Hebrew, Interlingua, Basque, Latin, and Walloon.
On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 05:47:46PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Does Latin meet that requirement? The aboriginal Sami minority in
I'm sure there are more than 10000 people who knows latin. At least every doctor in Hungary ought to. :)
If this is the problem, why not solve this problem. Split the lists in two or three different lists: Languages with more than 20K articles can be considered "useful" encyclopedias, languages with 1K-20K articles can be listed as "developing" encyclopedias, and languages with less than 1K articles are "experimental".
Allright. So I am going on with my bot to create year articles (let's start with 3000), and create cities (~4500) and maybe country templates and ... and...
Yep. We have ~600 articles, but they are _real_. Not templates. Not automatically created. I believe I can create around 10000 of those without much thinking. So we can be "useful" in, say, I week. Progress is fast nowadays, isn't it?
(All I wanted to say: article count isn't god's way to rate us. Apart from the problem that there ain't no god.)
--grin
ps: ...on the other hand the number of speakers of a language.... (much harder to boost artifically)
Peter Gervai wrote:
Yep. We have ~600 articles, but they are _real_. Not templates. Not [...] (All I wanted to say: article count isn't god's way to rate us. Apart from
This is of course not about "rating" a people or language per se, only indicating the size (at a point in time) of a collection of articles. It took me (alone) only one month to write the first 1000 articles (real articles) in my own wiki website, so 600 articles is a very small collection.
I'm not suggesting to remove the smaller language Wikipedias, only to separate big from small in lists such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_coordination
The Hungarian Wikipedia has gotten a late start, but I'm sure it will soon reach 6000 and then 60,000 articles, just like German, Polish and Swedish, so you need not worry. But I'm worried that Sami or Kashubian will never reach 600, and I don't think we should stop them from trying just because these languages might not have 10,000 active speakers. When someone asks why there is no active Kashubian Wikipedia, do you think we should answer "they tried but have not yet succeeded" or "we have forbidden them from trying"?
And what if the Poles (46 million speakers) and Germans (140 million speakers) would decide to set the limit at 30 million speakers instead of 10 thousand, then both you (Hungarian, 15 million speakers) and me (Swedish, 9 million speakers) will be in trouble.
To me, it matters not whether a language is artificial or whether it has naturally developed over hundreds of years. It does matter, however, how many speakers there are, and if we can realistically create a complete and accurate encyclopedia with that number of speakers. I'd say a minimum of 10,000 active speakers is a requirement for creating an encyclopedia. Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that requirement.
Although I share the POV of Erik that we do not really need Toki Pona, I must say, that this argument can't be true, sine there are just 2 fuzzy choises: eighter the languge is not importand and has not much articles (in this case their can not be much interwiki-links to that language) or it is important and has much articles.
--Ivo Köthnig
Ivo-
choises: eighter the languge is not importand and has not much articles (in this case their can not be much interwiki-links to that language) or it is important and has much articles.
Having many articles does not make a language important. With some basic Klingon skills I could get the article count up to 30,000 by translating the US census data. Furthermore, most conlang Wikipedias will effectively be abused as dictionaries for their respective languages, and if a very dedicated conlang inventor like Sonja works on the wiki, they can easily get to a few thousand definition "articles" in little time. Hell, my own infoAnarchy wiki has 3100 pages created by a handful of volunteers. That does not mean it is an encyclopedia, nor does it mean it ever has the potential to become one.
I'll create a page on Meta for voting on new language Wikipedias (and I would like for a vote to be also applied to Toki Pona). That seems like the most reasonable solution to this problem.
Regards,
Erik
"EM" == Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de writes:
EM> Having many articles does not make a language important.
Actually, I'd take that a step further: being important does not justify having a Wikipedia for the language.
The most crucial thing for a wikipedia (or any wiki) is having an active community that's willing to feed, water, prune and tend the wiki.
Some things that are probably really crucial to getting a wikipedia off the ground:
* A _core_group_ of individuals willing to get the wiki started.
* A non-zero pool of _potential_contributors_; people who will or could be either committed or occasional editors.
* A _liaison_ (or multiple liaisons) willing to keep the community informed about goings on in the greater pediasphere, and vice versa.
* A _translation_ of the key documents necessary to allow new users to become contributors: the UI interface file, the MediaWiki Users' Guide, NPOV.
~ESP
Erik Moeller wrote:
Ivo-
choises: eighter the languge is not importand and has not much articles (in this case their can not be much interwiki-links to that language) or it is important and has much articles.
Having many articles does not make a language important. With some basic Klingon skills I could get the article count up to 30,000 by translating the US census data. Furthermore, most conlang Wikipedias will effectively be abused as dictionaries for their respective languages, and if a very dedicated conlang inventor like Sonja works on the wiki, they can easily get to a few thousand definition "articles" in little time. Hell, my own infoAnarchy wiki has 3100 pages created by a handful of volunteers. That does not mean it is an encyclopedia, nor does it mean it ever has the potential to become one.
I'll create a page on Meta for voting on new language Wikipedias (and I would like for a vote to be also applied to Toki Pona). That seems like the most reasonable solution to this problem.
Regards,
Erik _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
I disagree - it is not up to current users to decide whether a language community wants its own wikipedia. This just gives the english wikipedia an effective veto.
I have no problem at all with _any_ natural language having a wikipedia if there is the desire for one. The complaints about costs must be negligible compared to the cost of en, for example. What is the actual costs for a small wikipedia - bandwidth and a tiny bit of disk space?
The issue that has been raised refers to conlangs - I think we need to separate out the two. I agree that we would look silly having Klingon, and that we will need to moderate conlangs - in the same way that some articles about conlangs have been deleted if they exist only in the mind of their creators.
Fundamentally I don't see this as a massive problem - if we get over-run by conlangs then we need to reconsider, but at the moment all natural languages that request a wikipedia should get one.
Caroline / Secretlondon
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org