Indeed. If I recall correctly Jimbo once said something along the lines of Wikipedias for small, threatened, and endangered languages fit in well with the mission of the Foundation (though I may well be wrong, this may've been someone else, if that is the case please let me know), and I agree there. I think Wikipedia could play a very significant role in bridging the gap between the "have"s and the "have not"s in many parts of the world. (ie acc'd to Hemanshu, in India there is a widespread belief that you have to know English to use a computer; perhaps this would change if there was a huge online encyclopedia in local languages; many people in many regions of the world could use the internet if they wanted but don't because they can't understand a single word of the content currently available) For languages like Maori and Hawai'ian, an encyclopedic resource written entirely in them would undoubtedly provide a much-needed resource for their language nest movements (maori -> kohanga reo, hawai'ian -> punana leo). As of right now there is no Hawai'ian wikipedia but I'm sure it would be very easy to solicit Punana Leo educators (as well as educators from Hawai'ian-language primary and secondary schools) to come and build a wikipedia, and I bet they'd do it quickly too with that kind of motivation (as it is, they have nights where parents come in and translate textbooks paragraph by paragraph, pasting Hawai'ian translations on over the English paragraphs; imagine if a similar effort were applied to Wikipedia except in addition rather than on top of) Similarly with a Gothic Wikipedia, the 400 or so children that are currently being raised in Gothic (some of whom may well not be children anymore, I'm not sure) as well as those to come in the future would have an encyclopedic resource which could be of tremendous help to them. Objections on the grounds that Gothic died too long ago are baseless unless you are also agaisnt the Cornish wikipedia because Gothic, although it died a really long time ago in Western Europe, persisted until maybe even into the industrial age in the Crimea, as long or maybe even longer than Cornish. And the Cornish wikipedia already has over 120 articles over a couple of weeks with only two active contributors and only one really active contributor. And Gothic, unlike Cornish, does not have the multiple varieties and the infighting. --node On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 20:02:19 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw(a)users.sf.net> wrote:

Caroline, congrats on your first 1000 articles in lb:! --node On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 01:06:07 +0200, Ewen Caroline <caroline(a)www.web.lu> wrote:

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 06:21:16 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: It's one thing to say that sort of thing in a private e-mail or even to everybody *but* me, but when you say it so I can read it, that's asking for a fight, I think, though I'm not really wanting to fight. Anyhow there are several things here - 1. Caroline's e-mail was in response to an e-mail talking about paying money and such to get a Wikipedia hosted. 2. An academic excersise? http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_3_110/ai_73064217/pg_1 <- Gothic was last heard in the Crimea by outsiders between the 1780s and 1790s, according to the page (and if travellers passing through still heard it in the 1780s, it probably survived in remote areas until the 1800s or 1810s). As is normal with language death, descendants of the last native speakers undoubtedly knew some of the language, less with each generation, until perhaps the 1850s or 1870s (though it could hardly be declared fluency most likely), and I would not be surprised if there are still a couple of hundred Gothic words in use by their descendants today in Tatar/Ukrainian/Russian/whatever language it is they speak now. Also it is not difficult to find pages on the internet (most of them with some reference to Matthew Carver) speaking of a Gothic revival of sorts (the 400 native speakers was my mistake, it turned out to be from a conworld page which looks confusingly real, declaring there are 2 million Gothic speakers in the Crimea). Also there is the fact that there are plenty of interested people - most of Gothic-L would probably be willing to contribute or at least help in some way. Of course if you still don't think it's a good idea, you're entitled to your opinion. I hope you are speaking only of conlangs here (I don't think we have any deadlangs with dead wikis), it would be a shame to delete some of our small-but-seemingly-dead wikis in small natural languages. But if you are speaking only of conlangs, then I entirely agree. the Klingon wikipedia might be moved to KLI webspace, and the Toki Pona wikipedia might be moved to the Toki Pona website, especially since Toki Pona itself is copyrighted (Klingon may be too, I'm not sure). The Lojban wikipedia is a bit questionable in my mind but it seems that in the minds of others it is on a level with tokipona: and tlh:, so perhaps it could be moved to the Lojban website? best, node

Actually there are fluent speakers (though no native speakers). I'm not sure about communication on a day-to-day basis, but I do know that I have seen entire e-mail conversations on lists as well as entire webpages in Gothic. Actually there are already people who are fluent in Gothic, and their internet connectivity percentage is probably much higher than for other such populations because the core of that community is academians (though there are plenty of general enthusiasts who are fluent). There's probably not much of a point of hosting the extant historical texts in WikiSource as a major project as they're already available online for free (under what license, I am not sure). No good dictionary? What? There are quite a few good Gothic dictionaries, a couple of them available on the Internet. There *is* contemporary writing, i.e. e-mails, webpages, and a small collection of short poetry. In fact there are even neologisms for things like "computer", "e-mail", and even "electric bill" (of course these are recent inventions, but they were derived similar to the way neologisms in Icelandic or in formal Arabic have been derived, ie using existing words in the language rather than borrowing). --node

Well, one main problem is that Toki Pona is copyrighted, and I believe KLI and Lojban may be too. --node On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 16:03:10 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: