Hi all, I have a question: why do we have separate Wikipedias for Malay and Indonesian?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Malay_and_Indonesian , "The differences between Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are comparable to the those between British English and American English."
If this is the case, then why does our policy on English differ so sharply than our policy with Malay/Indonesian?
Don't people realise that we're dividing labour? If they had col-laborated on a single Wikipedia from the very beginning, the Malay/Indonesian Wikipedia would probably have at least 15k articles by now.
Mark
Not to start up another argument (I remember the last ones), but this sounds like the same thing betweek Bokmal and Nynorsk.
James
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark Williamson Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 10:23 PM To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Why do we have them??
Hi all, I have a question: why do we have separate Wikipedias for Malay and Indonesian?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Malay_and_Indonesian , "The differences between Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are comparable to the those between British English and American English."
If this is the case, then why does our policy on English differ so sharply than our policy with Malay/Indonesian?
Don't people realise that we're dividing labour? If they had col-laborated on a single Wikipedia from the very beginning, the Malay/Indonesian Wikipedia would probably have at least 15k articles by now.
Mark
Mark Williamson wrote:
Hi all, I have a question: why do we have separate Wikipedias for Malay and Indonesian?
I've often asked the same question, this is my personal favourite linguistic hobby horse. Presumably any merge would have to occur with much input and help from the editor communities on each wiki, and I'm yet to make contact with any of them. They don't seem to be too concerned about the issue themselves, judging by the fact that none of them has brought a merge proposal to the Board, the developers or this list.
James R. Johnson wrote:
Not to start up another argument (I remember the last ones), but this sounds like the same thing betweek Bokmal and Nynorsk.
In Bokmål and Nyorsk are said to be barely mutually intelligible. The distinction between Indonesian and Malaysian was only made in 1945, both national languages are based on the standardised trading language. Even since 1945 there has been standardisation of the written language with cooperation from both countries, particularly the EYD spelling reform.
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
An important observation. In Wiktionary I keep having to beat back the argument that a wide assortment of conlangs are acceptable because they have been granted a code.
Ec
On 6/27/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
An important observation. In Wiktionary I keep having to beat back the argument that a wide assortment of conlangs are acceptable because they have been granted a code.
Ec
Which are those, just out of curiosity? (I imagine the list includes Esperanto and Volapük?)
-Patrick
I can't imagine a relatively sensible bloke like Ray trying to get Esperanto out of Wiktionary. I'm guessing more like... Klingon, Lojban...?
Mark
On 27/06/05, Patrick Hall pathall@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/27/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
An important observation. In Wiktionary I keep having to beat back the argument that a wide assortment of conlangs are acceptable because they have been granted a code.
Ec
Which are those, just out of curiosity? (I imagine the list includes Esperanto and Volapük?)
-Patrick _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Mark Williamson wrote:
I can't imagine a relatively sensible bloke like Ray trying to get Esperanto out of Wiktionary. I'm guessing more like... Klingon, Lojban...?
This is another argument against touching qualitative aspects (constructed or not) of languages and projects, and for focusing instead on quantitative aspects: Are people willing to do serious work over a long time? For Esperanto: yes, apparently.
Patrick Hall wrote:
On 6/27/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
An important observation. In Wiktionary I keep having to beat back the argument that a wide assortment of conlangs are acceptable because they have been granted a code.
Ec
Which are those, just out of curiosity? (I imagine the list includes Esperanto and Volapük?)
Esperanto, Interlingua and Volapük have been established for some time. I suppose too that Ido and Lojban have some claim to legitimacy.
I just cleaned out a number of Latenkwa entries. Then there's Romanica, Espreso, Sasxsek, Lingua Franca Nova, Klingon, Quenya, D'ni, Glos, Bitruscan, Sindarin, Cirth, Tengwar, and probably a few others.
Ec
I would imagine that there are some basic standards.
I can't name them, but I can say which ones do and don't follow the standards I would approve of:
Romanica, Espreso, Sasxsek, D'ni, Glos, and Bitruscan most certainly don't meet the standard.
LFN, Klingon, Quenya, Sindarin, Cirth, and Tengwar may or may not. One important thing is that as far as I know, Romanica, Espreso, Sasxsek, D'ni, Glos, and Bitruscan have very few people who care at all about them, while LFN, Klingon, Quenya, Sindarin, Cirth, and Tengwar have some degree of followers (to be sure, I sometimes wish Tolkien had combined all his languages into Tolkienish --- it's too bad the Tolkien languages fanbase is sort of divided over so many different languages)
Mark
On 27/06/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Patrick Hall wrote:
On 6/27/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
An important observation. In Wiktionary I keep having to beat back the argument that a wide assortment of conlangs are acceptable because they have been granted a code.
Ec
Which are those, just out of curiosity? (I imagine the list includes Esperanto and Volapük?)
Esperanto, Interlingua and Volapük have been established for some time. I suppose too that Ido and Lojban have some claim to legitimacy.
I just cleaned out a number of Latenkwa entries. Then there's Romanica, Espreso, Sasxsek, Lingua Franca Nova, Klingon, Quenya, D'ni, Glos, Bitruscan, Sindarin, Cirth, Tengwar, and probably a few others.
Ec
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"Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote in message news:849f98ed050627143841a440ca@mail.gmail.com... [heavy snippage]
... Quenya, Sindarin, Cirth, and Tengwar have some degree of followers (to be sure, I sometimes wish Tolkien had combined all his languages into Tolkienish --- it's too bad the Tolkien languages fanbase is sort of divided over so many different languages)
So why not have one "Middle-Earth languages" wikipedia, which can accept articles written in any or all of the above?
I would assume that the problem of overlapping titles would not arise since the titles would necessarily be different even between languages using the same script.
Which raises a question: is it possible to come up with a system which replicates the functionality of inter-wiki links between pages within the same wiki?
From: "Phil Boswell" phil.boswell@gmail.com So why not have one "Middle-Earth languages" wikipedia, which can accept articles written in any or all of the above?
Well, Quenya and Sindarin are as far apart as Latin and French, or almost so. We can't use them on one Wikipedia. Just create Quenya first, if we are to create Tolkien pedias at all.
Wouter
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Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
From: "Phil Boswell" phil.boswell@gmail.com So why not have one "Middle-Earth languages" wikipedia, which can accept articles written in any or all of the above?
Well, Quenya and Sindarin are as far apart as Latin and French, or almost so. We can't use them on one Wikipedia. Just create Quenya first, if we are to create Tolkien pedias at all.
Wouter
There is also a script problem - worse than choosing between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets :)
- -- Alphax OpenPGP key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/cc9up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis
From: Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com
Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
From: "Phil Boswell" phil.boswell@gmail.com So why not have one "Middle-Earth languages" wikipedia, which can
accept
articles written in any or all of the above?
Well, Quenya and Sindarin are as far apart as Latin and French, or almost so. We can't use them on one Wikipedia. Just create Quenya first, if we are to create Tolkien pedias at all.
Wouter
There is also a script problem - worse than choosing between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets :)
And similar to the problem on tlh:
W.
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Yes, we can.
I did that to a certain degree on sh:... I would link from the Cyrillic version of an article to the Latin version with, for example, [[hr:sh:Astronomija]]. The name on the interwiki is for the Croatian Wikipedia, yet it goes to the Srpskohrvatski Wikipedia.
Mark
On 28/06/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
"Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote in message news:849f98ed050627143841a440ca@mail.gmail.com... [heavy snippage]
... Quenya, Sindarin, Cirth, and Tengwar have some degree of followers (to be sure, I sometimes wish Tolkien had combined all his languages into Tolkienish --- it's too bad the Tolkien languages fanbase is sort of divided over so many different languages)
So why not have one "Middle-Earth languages" wikipedia, which can accept articles written in any or all of the above?
I would assume that the problem of overlapping titles would not arise since the titles would necessarily be different even between languages using the same script.
Which raises a question: is it possible to come up with a system which replicates the functionality of inter-wiki links between pages within the same wiki? -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Hi,
Le Tuesday 28 June 2005 11:46, Phil Boswell a écrit :
"Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote in message news:849f98ed050627143841a440ca@mail.gmail.com... [heavy snippage]
... Quenya, Sindarin, Cirth, and Tengwar have some degree of followers (to be sure, I sometimes wish Tolkien had combined all his languages into Tolkienish --- it's too bad the Tolkien languages fanbase is sort of divided over so many different languages)
So why not have one "Middle-Earth languages" wikipedia, which can accept articles written in any or all of the above?
I don't think there should be any Wikipedia in any of the Tolkien languages. Tolkien is a wonderful author, but Wikipedia is not here to host this kind of languages. But maybe in Wikicities ?
Yann
On 6/28/05, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
I don't think there should be any Wikipedia in any of the Tolkien languages. Tolkien is a wonderful author, but Wikipedia is not here to host this kind of languages. But maybe in Wikicities ?
http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Lambengolmor
The Lambengolmor Wikicity is a wiki for content in or about Tolkien's Middle-Earth languages. Two people edited there on 7 March and nothing has happened on the wiki since then, so it would seem that people are more interested in discussing these languages on meta than actually creating content in them.
Angela.
Angela wrote:
On 6/28/05, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
I don't think there should be any Wikipedia in any of the Tolkien languages. Tolkien is a wonderful author, but Wikipedia is not here to host this kind of languages. But maybe in Wikicities ?
http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Lambengolmor
The Lambengolmor Wikicity is a wiki for content in or about Tolkien's Middle-Earth languages. Two people edited there on 7 March and nothing has happened on the wiki since then, so it would seem that people are more interested in discussing these languages on meta than actually creating content in them.
This seems like a familiar pattern!
Ec
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
Le Tuesday 28 June 2005 11:46, Phil Boswell a écrit :
"Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote in message news:849f98ed050627143841a440ca@mail.gmail.com... [heavy snippage]
... Quenya, Sindarin, Cirth, and Tengwar have some degree of followers (to be sure, I sometimes wish Tolkien had combined all his languages into Tolkienish --- it's too bad the Tolkien languages fanbase is sort of divided over so many different languages)
So why not have one "Middle-Earth languages" wikipedia, which can accept articles written in any or all of the above?
I don't think there should be any Wikipedia in any of the Tolkien languages. Tolkien is a wonderful author, but Wikipedia is not here to host this kind of languages. But maybe in Wikicities ?
I would also be happy to rid Wiktionary of this sort of thing. The supporters of these languages seem to have only questionable contact with reality. Tolkien was a learnèd man whose philological studies helped to make his stories more vibrant, but sometimes people need to be reminded tha "Lord of the Rings" was a work of _fiction_. The languages developed there are also works of fiction with no credibility in the real world, and no basis for development beyond the context of Tolkien's books. That being said, any attempt at building an encyclopedia in these languages must falter when it needs to develop vocabulary for concepts that are alien to Middle Earth.
It is fitting that Wikipedia have an article giving an outline of these languages, and that Wikibooks might even give an outline of the grammar. Apart from that can we at least try to find some separation between the real and fantasy world?
Ec
I would also be happy to rid Wiktionary of this sort of thing. The supporters of these languages seem to have only questionable contact with reality. Tolkien was a learnèd man whose philological studies helped to make his stories more vibrant, but sometimes people need to be reminded tha "Lord of the Rings" was a work of _fiction_. The languages developed there are also works of fiction with no credibility in the real world, and no basis for development beyond the context of Tolkien's books. That being said, any attempt at building an encyclopedia in these languages must falter when it needs to develop vocabulary for concepts that are alien to Middle Earth.
It is fitting that Wikipedia have an article giving an outline of these languages, and that Wikibooks might even give an outline of the grammar. Apart from that can we at least try to find some separation between the real and fantasy world?
Ec
Please, please, please, don't get personal! W.
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Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
I would also be happy to rid Wiktionary of this sort of thing. The supporters of these languages seem to have only questionable contact with reality. Tolkien was a learnèd man whose philological studies helped to make his stories more vibrant, but sometimes people need to be reminded tha "Lord of the Rings" was a work of _fiction_. The languages developed there are also works of fiction with no credibility in the real world, and no basis for development beyond the context of Tolkien's books. That being said, any attempt at building an encyclopedia in these languages must falter when it needs to develop vocabulary for concepts that are alien to Middle Earth.
It is fitting that Wikipedia have an article giving an outline of these languages, and that Wikibooks might even give an outline of the grammar. Apart from that can we at least try to find some separation between the real and fantasy world?
Ec
Please, please, please, don't get personal! W.
There's absolutely nothing personal in that. Try as I might I can only see generic comments in what I said. However, if you really think that there is such a place as Middle Earth I shall be more than happy to apologize to its residents. :-)
Ec
From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Middle-Earth Wikipedia Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:41:22 -0700
Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
I would also be happy to rid Wiktionary of this sort of thing. The supporters of these languages seem to have only questionable contact with reality. Tolkien was a learnèd man whose philological studies helped to make his stories more vibrant, but sometimes people need to be reminded tha "Lord of the Rings" was a work of _fiction_. The languages developed there are also works of fiction with no credibility in the real world, and no basis for development beyond the context of Tolkien's books. That being said, any attempt at building an encyclopedia in these languages must falter when it needs to develop vocabulary for concepts that are alien to Middle Earth.
It is fitting that Wikipedia have an article giving an outline of these languages, and that Wikibooks might even give an outline of the grammar. Apart from that can we at least try to find some separation between the real and fantasy world?
Ec
Please, please, please, don't get personal! W.
There's absolutely nothing personal in that. Try as I might I can only see generic comments in what I said. However, if you really think that there is such a place as Middle Earth I shall be more than happy to apologize to its residents. :-)
Ec
Huh huh huh. There we go again. Do you see what I mean now? Of course the Tolkienists know it is fantasy. Why the HELL should anyone learning a fictional language be pathologically confusing fantasy and reality. there are perhaps a few who do, but it is really offensive and personal to state they all do, or the majority of them does. Learning Quenya and Sindarin is most of all a tribute to Tolkien's great work and the beatiful languages he created. And note: a language is always an abstracted thing. It either never exits or already exists when someone invented it, since it dwells in people's minds and in written records. So while elves, Isengard, dwarves, Sauron, hobbits, Gandalf, Lothlorien etc. all don't exist, Quenya and Sindarin surely do.
Btw I speak none of Tolkien's languages (yet). Wouter
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Ray Saintonge wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
An important observation. In Wiktionary I keep having to beat back the argument that a wide assortment of conlangs are acceptable because they have been granted a code.
Ec
Hoi, Well actually, you are beating back the arrival of conlangs in the English wiktionary. It is most definetly not universally accepted that conlangs should not exist in a Wiktionary. When conlangs do not exist exept for their occurance in a Wiktionary, that is another matter.
When the spelling of words is different according to where they are used, the words are definitly needed in both forms and they need to be in a Wiktionary. Papiamento for instance has two distinct ways of spelling. It would be stupid NOT to have both official spellings in a Wiktionary. So when a language code marks a different way of pronouncing or a different way of spelling, it has its place in Wiktionary. In Wikipedia you can say things like "both can speak and read their versions of a language" in a Wiktionary you represent the existing spelling of words and you are not involved in judging if a spelling is political correct or not.
In Ultimate Wiktionary, we want to have it a user preference that will allow you to select what languages you want to add. The languages that will be allowed to start with will be the ones that have a language code. Within a language there will be room for distinct spellings. There will also be room for old spellings; this is particularly relevant for the Dutch language as it will have new spelling rules that will be published on October 15 and will be the official spelling from August 1 2006 onwards.
Thanks, GerardM
Tim Starling wrote:
I think we can put the blame on our use of language code lists which are biased towards political rather than linguistic divisions.
Absolutely. We started out using the ISO codes because they are external to us (which is usually a good thing because it gives us one less thing to argue about so we can just get our work done) and because I assumed they were more or less sensible.
As it turns out, though, the ISO codes are highly politicized and often just plain wrong. This means that we have inconsistencies that are hard to correct after the fact, because it involves community issues, etc.
I hope that over time, we will get better and better at this and the existing nonsense will be ironed out over time. I view this as a longterm project that is going to take a few years.
--Jimbo
On 6/27/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
As it turns out, though, the ISO codes are highly politicized and often just plain wrong. This means that we have inconsistencies that are hard to correct after the fact, because it involves community issues, etc.
I hope that over time, we will get better and better at this and the existing nonsense will be ironed out over time. I view this as a longterm project that is going to take a few years.
One argument about politicization of ISO codes:
Serbo-Croatian standard language had two three letters code with describing differences between alphabets: SCR for SC written in Latin (Roman) alphabet and SCC for SC written in Cyrillic alphabet. Now, SCR is assumed as "Croatian before Croatian" and SCC as "Serbian before Serbian". In the fact, more then 50% (maybe 60%, maybe 70%) of Serbian books during 70s and 80s are written in Latin alphabet and there were one important cultural movement between world wars in Croatia which assumed writing in Cyrillic. (As well as during SFRY some Croatians, very rare, are writing in Cyrillic.)
I am not sure what is the sense of such decision of ISO.
Mark Williamson (node.ue@gmail.com) [050625 12:22]:
I have a question: why do we have separate Wikipedias for Malay and Indonesian? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Malay_and_Indonesian , "The differences between Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are comparable to the those between British English and American English." If this is the case, then why does our policy on English differ so sharply than our policy with Malay/Indonesian?
Probably the same reason we have separate wikis for Bosian, Serbian and Croatian. And for Romanian and Moldovan.
- d.
Hi all, I have a question: why do we have separate Wikipedias for Malay and Indonesian?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Malay_and_Indonesian , "The differences between Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are comparable to the those between British English and American English."
If this is the case, then why does our policy on English differ so sharply than our policy with Malay/Indonesian?
Don't people realise that we're dividing labour? If they had col-laborated on a single Wikipedia from the very beginning, the Malay/Indonesian Wikipedia would probably have at least 15k articles by now.
Mark
Just for the same reason that we have seperate Serbian, Croatic and Bosniak Wikipedias. They consider their languages as being separate, and Indonesian is from above considered "the" Indonesian language, even though it is relatively unprominent in terms of numbers of speakers. You should be familiar with that issue, working on the Moldovan Wikipedia and now mingling in the discussion on Serbocroatian. Don't tell the Indonesians they speak Malayan, that will insult them, though (or just because) in the Dutch colonial era everyone called it so.
Wouter
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Wouter Steenbeek wrote:
Just for the same reason that we have seperate Serbian, Croatic and Bosniak Wikipedias. They consider their languages as being separate,
I recently visited Serbia and Croatia, and opinions there are divided as to whether the languages are separate. The significant majority opinion seems to me to be that they are not separate languages, but I did meet a few people who argued that they are.
However, we had a Wikipedia meetup at Millosh's house, with Serbian Wikipedians and the Croatians who drove me there, and they all immediately and quite easily talked to each other without any difficulty at all. Of course I did not understand a word, but it did not seem to me any different from American and British English.
With Serbian/Croatian/Bosnia(n|k) there are significant other issues as well, having to do with the fact that they just concluded a rather awful war not so long ago. This complicates matters in a number of ways.
First, it increases the chance of major NPOV problems if people of different views choose to work in different places rather than meeting in the same place to try to achieve consensus. Second, it decreases the chance of major useless flamewars if people who are still very angry becasue of the deaths of loved ones can't find a way to agree.
There are additional complications, though, having to do with spelling and script. I'm not an expert, but essentially there are 4 different ways to write and... well, anyway, it is complicated.
The one thing I can say about this is that Wikipedians there are like Wikipedians everywhere -- people of good will who seem to really care about getting it right, and thoughtfully feeling their way forward in a manner that attempts to be cognizant of significant opinions and difficulties. I left feeling much better about the whole mess than I thought I would. There are good people there, and they'll figure it out.
--Jimbo
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