Having said all that, here's my main point. I value your enthusiasm and I am in favour any appropriate means for preserving and promoting endangered minority languages (which are a precious cultural heritage) such as Saterlandic Frisian. However, I think it's just impossible to create a useful online encyclopedia depending on volunteer editors out of a community of barely 2000 native speakers. Please think about it. From looking at your name, I guess you are not a native speaker, are you? Please don't get me wrong. Of course, you can set up a Saterlandic wikipedia technically. But once it is installed would it ever have the slightest chance of becoming a useful, reliable source of information? Could it ever really flourish? If so, great! But given the small number of Saterlandic speakers I really doubt that. And please remember that even for those, say, 1.800 people the language they read and write in is German.

How many editors does a wikipedia need to work (even if only at a very modest level)? E. g. the Dutch wikipedia (with c. 55,000 articles) currently has 9,333 registered editors, out of a language community of maybe 23 million. That equals a ratio of 0.04 % editors - and even if that number might still grow in the future, most wikipedia languages probably won't even reach that percentage. Now try to break that down for Saterlandic! In my opinion the only way for a wikipedia to become a success is to bring together a large number of people to cooperate. As far as Saterlandic is concerned, that is just not possible. That is a pity, of course. But it's the truth.

If you think I am too pessimistic please have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_ranking_February_2005, ranks 86 through 161. It's not that those wikipedias have just been established recently. Matter of fact, most of them have existed for quite some time now. Some of them have been around for a couple of years or more. And all of them have been them have been set up with the best of intentions by committed people just like you. And many of those languages have millions of speakers. But nevertheless, those wikipedias just aren't running. I always get kind of sad when I look at them. I surely wouldn't like to see a Saterlandic edition ending up like that.

From: Mark Williamson &lt;node.ue(a)gmail.com&gt; Reply-To: Mark Williamson <node.ue@gmail.com>,wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org To: wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 14:23:26 -0700 I am in favour any appropriate means for preserving and promoting endangered minority languages (which are a precious cultural heritage) such as Saterlandic Frisian. However, I think it's just impossible to create a useful online encyclopedia depending on volunteer editors out of a community of barely 2000 native speakers. Please think about it. From looking at your name, I guess you are not a native speaker, are you? Please don't get me wrong. Of course, you can set up a Saterlandic wikipedia technically. But once it is installed would it ever have the slightest chance of becoming a useful, reliable source of information? Could it ever really flourish? If so, great! But given the small number of Saterlandic speakers I really doubt that. And please remember that even for those, say, 1.800 people the language they read and write in is German. I for one think that a smaller community (even a "microcommunity" perhaps) is more conducive to the Wiki concept because unlike such large communities as Dutch or German speakers, it is very conceivable that /every single speaker/ of Saterlandic Frisian could become involved in such a Wikipedia. I once had an idea, that we could set up a Hopi Wikipedia, and then work on promotion of it on Hopi, get elders and teenagers involved, try to get middle-aged people involved as well, and eventually hope for 90% community involvement of Hopi speakers. When such a point is reached, it is a virtual mirror of the real-life community, except it is also working towards building an encyclopaedia. Unfortunately I don't have the time or the resources to begin such a project, and generally Hopi people are very distrusting of white people in such matters (and with good reason, too) and although a medium level of involvement may be reached, it might be hard to get elders involved in what they see as a possible attempt by whites to poison or kill Hopi language and culture. However, in the future I will consider this idea, but I think there are more ideal communities, for example the community of Havasupai speakers living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon - there are less of them, only a few hundred, but unlike Hopi, the entire community speaks the language. (there are at least 3 monolinguals, although there are more for Hopi) With the already developing advanced infrastructure of the community, it is much more conceivable that total community involvement in a Havasupai-language Wikipedia could be reached, including everybody from the elders to the schoolchildren, all of whom speak the language and are isolated by their location (at the bottom of the Grand Canyon). modest level)? E. g. the Dutch wikipedia (with c. 55,000 articles) currently has 9,333 registered editors, out of a language community of maybe 23 million. That equals a ratio of 0.04 % editors - and even if that number might still grow in the future, most wikipedia languages probably won't even reach that percentage. Now try to break that down for Saterlandic! In my opinion the only way for a wikipedia to become a success is to bring together a large number of people to cooperate. As far as Saterlandic is concerned, that is just not possible. That is a pity, of course. But it's the truth. Why is it not possible? When you have such a small speaker community, promotion is easier - you could even go door-to-door! Even at the worst case, I think that 30% community involvement is there, given promotion effort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_ranking_February_2005, ranks 86 through 161. It's not that those wikipedias have just been established recently. Matter of fact, most of them have existed for quite some time now. Some of them have been around for a couple of years or more. And all of them have been them have been set up with the best of intentions by committed people just like you. And many of those languages have millions of speakers. But nevertheless, those wikipedias just aren't running. I always get kind of sad when I look at them. I surely wouldn't like to see a Saterlandic edition ending up like that. Most of these Wikipedias were requested by people who had the notion "I have heard of this language. There is no Wikipedia in it. It should be created." but were never followed up after their creation. In addition, even these ill-requested Wikipedias are picking up speed, one-by-one... look at the flurry of activity on ka:, li:, hy:, etc. which had previously been inactive for months (li: actually had 0 pages)! ka: and hy:, two important languages of the Caucasus region (Georgian and Armenian), now have over 100 articles and are quickly growing more! Unfortunately it seems that such success is limited almost exclusively to European languages and more recently Indic languages to a certain degree, although African languages (examples are Bambara bm:, Wolof wo:, Amharic am:, Lingala ln:) have seen some unexpected activity recently. However, it seems to me that Wouter has some connection to this language (given his intimate knowledge of the specific differences from West Frisian), and given that he has said he started a test Wikipedia on Meta, I don't think this is idle talk from a non-speaker. Mark _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

The most respected Mr. Mark Williamson wrote: Instead of only reporting on your hopes and dreams, I wish that you would, once each month or so, take the time to report on what you have indeed accomplished. Which new language Wikipedias did you succeed to get started, and how many articles have been produced there? So far, I get the impression that this number is zero, and that surely must be wrong. So please enlighten me.

But you certainly have the time to write a lot of messages on this list.

Mark Williamson wrote: I'm sorry to say that this perception is created anew every week, as long as this list is dominated by messages from you discussing your principal stance ("theory") rather than actual achievements ("practice"). Especially the long and tiresome discussion of various tongues from China seemed to be of very little practical use.

It still takes a lot of time, at least for me, to read all the messages on this list. I wish there was more substance in them. I'm also sorry to add to the impression that I'm only complaining. So let me end by telling that last month I scanned a public domain Finnish encyclopedia of 4 volumes and that more than 100 articles or stubs from it have already been imported into the Finnish Wikipedia, as shown by the category http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luokka:Pienest%C3%A4_tietosanakirjasta_tuodut_…

Mark Williamson wrote: Sorry Mark, if you wanted to put me down, you failed. You must try a lot harder to succeed with that. I'll be quiet now and watch you build your own reputation on this list and elsewhere. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l