--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Thus helping to preserve an endangered language by hosting an encyclopedia in it also directly furthers our goal. This would not include non-famous conlangs since those are largely original research.
This would be an argument for having good articles like [[en:Hopi language]] (and the equivalents in de:, ja:, zh:, fr:, etc.) -- information about languages written in a language that people can read. Merely preserving a language that nobody reads by writing an encyclopedia that nobody reads in it isn't really furthing the goal of disseminating information to people.
A great deal of information and cultural heritage is contained in the language itself. This goes way beyond what any set of articles in other languages can ever hope to accomplish.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
A great deal of information and cultural heritage is contained in the language itself. This goes way beyond what any set of articles in other languages can ever hope to accomplish.
I might agree, but disagree that a Wikipedia-produced encyclopedia in the language effectively captures it. Does the Latin Wikipedia properly capture the cultural heritage of Latin, for example, or merely the perspective of English, German, French and other speakers writing Latin as a second language? More importantly, does having a new article on quantum mechanics written in Latin contribute anything that the extant corpus of Latin writing doesn't?
I think preserving languages is an interesting aim, but something separate from writing an encyclopedia. Even in cases like Hopi where the extant writing is much less extensive than Latin, it's not clear to me that writing an encyclopedia in Hopi is the best way to preserve it---is translating [[en:Milwaukee, Wisconsin]] to Hopi more useful than, say, writing original literature or poetry in the language in terms of preserving the language? It's clearly not very useful in terms of communicating information about Milwaukee itself to anyone, because nobody who wanted to know about Milwaukee would look there first...
-Mark
What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee?
Hopi speakers make up 0.002% of the population of the US. This isn't very big, but it's not very small, either.
If you consider it at a state level, just over 0.1% of the population of Arizona speaks Hopi.
Over 5800 people total speak Hopi (about 1000 of them living outside of Arizona), including a number of monolinguals. In one generation, this number is expected to increase rather than decrease, although with the deaths of "baby boomers" while the number will go down, the percentage is expected to go up.
Nearly all 5800 people speak Hopi "better" than they speak English, and literacy in Hopi is high (especially when compared with, say, Navajo). This is not to say that none of these people have advanced English skills, just that for almost all of them speak English as their second language.
This is a language that people still use regularly, it is a language with radio broadcasts and publications in it, it is a language which some people still use more than they use English and which for thousands is a collection of the words which come before all else.
In the case of a language such as Winnebago (no, it's not the language of people who live in trailers), which has been extinct for a while, the prospect of an encyclopedia is much more questionable. That's not the question I'm asking here. We aren't talking about a language which is no longer used or spoken.
Also please keep in mind that "minority language" includes any language not spoken by the majority - thus, Catalan is a minority language in Spain although it has over 8 million speakers, Telugu is a minority language in India although it has over 20 million speakers, but in the same vein Hopi is a minority language in Arizona with just under 6 thousand speakers, and Havasupai is a minority language in Arizona with 580 speakers (550 in Arizona, or 0.012% of Arizonans), although Havasupai is spoken by every single member of the Havasupai nation.
Thus we are not talking about language preservation exactly, but rather building an encyclopaedia in a minority language as an aid to the continued existance of the language - Havasupai is used in schools, as is Hopi, and with Wikipedias in these languages there would be a vast body of written knowledge available to educators and to learners alike, and people would have access to information in their first language.
What some people seem to be thinking of is a Wikipedia in a language with barely any or no remaining speakers as a sort of work of art. This is also an important concept, but there are obviously many more differing viewpoints here and the exact situation would differ from language to language. However that isn't exactly what I'm talking about.
Mark
On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:13:22 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
A great deal of information and cultural heritage is contained in the language itself. This goes way beyond what any set of articles in other languages can ever hope to accomplish.
I might agree, but disagree that a Wikipedia-produced encyclopedia in the language effectively captures it. Does the Latin Wikipedia properly capture the cultural heritage of Latin, for example, or merely the perspective of English, German, French and other speakers writing Latin as a second language? More importantly, does having a new article on quantum mechanics written in Latin contribute anything that the extant corpus of Latin writing doesn't?
I think preserving languages is an interesting aim, but something separate from writing an encyclopedia. Even in cases like Hopi where the extant writing is much less extensive than Latin, it's not clear to me that writing an encyclopedia in Hopi is the best way to preserve it---is translating [[en:Milwaukee, Wisconsin]] to Hopi more useful than, say, writing original literature or poetry in the language in terms of preserving the language? It's clearly not very useful in terms of communicating information about Milwaukee itself to anyone, because nobody who wanted to know about Milwaukee would look there first...
-Mark
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On Mar 9, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee?
What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby horses? The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the community's activities push towards the best possible knowledge source while restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the pedia. After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical wikis, I am going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be represented in proportion to their importance. Overwhelmingly our readers are in major languages, and the challenges facing these large wikipedias should be occupying far more of the discussion than is currently the case.
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 21:03:39 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
On Mar 9, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee?
What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby horses?
"Private hobby horses"? We're talking about languages that are spoken by real people, not just hobbies.
It is not my responsibility or anybody's for that matter to make sure any one person's needs are being met. I am more concerned about the needs of minority language speakers. I think that an English-speaker's needs are being met by the project much better currently than a Sinhala speaker (national language of Srilanka) or a Hopi speaker.
If you are concerned about the "vast majority of our readers", then you can go ahead and take care of their needs if you are so interested in doing that and feel it's not already being done.
If you want to start a thread about some sort of need of the "vast majority of our readers", you are quite welcome to. There are no restrictions on this list about "Thou shalt post exclusively regarding the Vast Majority of Thy Readers" or "Thou shalt post exclusively regarding the Minority Languages".
So quit whinging about these needs that we are supposedly not discussing or taking care of enough and start a thread on these "shortcomings".
The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the community's activities push towards the best possible knowledge source while restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the pedia.
I'm going to have to say to this, "Duh." Stating the painfully obvious.
After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical wikis, I am going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be represented in proportion to their importance.
"Importance" cannot be objectively measured. Any definition of "importance" that ties it down to any one measurable trait will obviously be hotly disputed.
Overwhelmingly our readers are in major languages, and the challenges facing these large wikipedias should be occupying far more of the discussion than is currently the case.
That's your POV. If you want more discussions on "major languages"' Wikipedias, go ahead and initiate some. Quit whinging about how we talk too much about minority languages and too little about majority languages, and start some discussions.
I don't see how NPOV applies to majority vs. minority languages.
Our goal is to provide an open-content encyclopaedia usable by every single person on earth, gratis. Quite a while ago, Jimbo added to this goal the additional goal of neutrality (and as has been shown, not everybody even agrees on what is neutral)
If it is to be usable by everybody, this means we cannot simply ignore minority languages. I don't have the statistics right here, but a very significant percentage of human beings speak languages with less than 1 million speakers as their native language. This is largely in Africa, Central America, Indonesia, New Guinea, India, and other undeveloped areas, but even developed areas have their fair share of minority languages, mostly with less than 1m speakers but sometimes with more (Catalan, Galician, Sardinian, &c).
Now, if you want to propose that we delete all minority language Wikipedias, you are welcome to do so but you will definitely not have much support because some of our largest Wikipedias are in minority languages - Catalan, Kurdish, Tatar, Basque, Welsh...
Mark
Stirling Newberry wrote:
On Mar 9, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee?
What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby horses? The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the community's activities push towards the best possible knowledge source while restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the pedia. After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical wikis, I am going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be represented in proportion to their importance. Overwhelmingly our readers are in major languages, and the challenges facing these large wikipedias should be occupying far more of the discussion than is currently the case.
That assumes it's zero-sum - that someone paying attention to a Hopi or Cantonese Wikipedia is automatically subtracted from the attention paid to the English or Mandarin Wikipedia - which you haven't demonstrated at all is the case, and which I really think isn't the case.
- d.
On Mar 10, 2005, at 5:33 AM, David Gerard wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
On Mar 9, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee?
What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby horses? The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the community's activities push towards the best possible knowledge source while restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the pedia. After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical wikis, I am going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be represented in proportion to their importance. Overwhelmingly our readers are in major languages, and the challenges facing these large wikipedias should be occupying far more of the discussion than is currently the case.
That assumes it's zero-sum - that someone paying attention to a Hopi or Cantonese Wikipedia is automatically subtracted from the attention paid to the English or Mandarin Wikipedia - which you haven't demonstrated at all is the case, and which I really think isn't the case.
- d.
No, I'm pointing out that the discussion here has lopsidedly been involved with issues that are of interest to small groups of readers, rather than the large group of readers. And there is a limited amount of discussion bandwidth, therefore a zero sum situation is in effect. The question "what if someone wants to read in Hopi" is much less of a problem then "what if someone wants to read comprehensive and unbiased articles."
If the wikiprocess is working, then there will be writers for where there are readers, that is, in fact, one of the things wikipedia offers: readers for writers.
Stirling Newberry wrote:
What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby horses? The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the community's activities push towards the best possible knowledge source while restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the pedia. After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical wikis, I am going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be represented in proportion to their importance. Overwhelmingly our readers are in major languages, and the challenges facing these large wikipedias should be occupying far more of the discussion than is currently the case.
It seems to me that NPOV is a policy meant to be applied to encyclopedic articles, not to metadiscussion on a mailing list. While I agree that (at this time) it is probably more "important" to work toward ironing out the major issues with the already extant and sizable language wikipedias than it is to create a myriad of less-sizable wikipedias, I don't think your justifications for your approach to the matter are really valid. Of course, that's just my POV. Luckily, this mailing list seems to be an appropriate place to air my POV, unlike an encyclopedia article.
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