Hi Wouter !
Thank you for taking the time to consider my arguments and for your comprehensive response. I agree with most of what you are writing and I am well aware that your request for Saterlandic is far more mature then many other pending Wikipedia language requests.
You're right, we might have slightly different ideas on what Wikipedia is all about. Let me briefly explain what it is to me.
You wrote:
Its main goal is, of course, providing freely editable and downloadable information. A second aim is to create encyclopaedias in as many languages as possible.
I certainly agree with you there. And so does Wikipedia's claim "The Free Encyclopia".
But what is an encyclopia supposed to be? Me, I think any encyclopedia - printed or online - should serve as a _comprehensive_and_reliable_ source of information. Otherwhise it's useless. Imagine you go about looking up something in a printed encyclopedia only to find out it lacks some article it definetly ought to contain. I'd probably throw that book into the nearest trash can. Now how many articles does an encyclopedia need to be useful for the reader? I suppose the world's most renowned encyclopedias all contain 100,000+ articles. More compact versions do exist, but I seriously doubt that any book with less than 10,000 articles could ever provide a useful amount of information from all fields of knowledge. Moreover, I guess it could not even be called an encyclopedia in that case. My point is that when we set up a new language edition of Wikipedia, it should at least have a chance to became a "real encyclopia" one day. But then again, other people might have different ! ideas of what an encyclopedia is supposed to be. That's perfectly fine.
As you might have noticed already my concerns are not so much about your Saterlandic proposal in particular but rather about wikipedias for lesser used languages and their pros and cons in general. You correctly emphasize - and so did Mark - that the number of speakers is not the only and maybe not even the key factor in a Wikipedia's success or failure. If that was the case, Bengali with more than 100 million native speakers would be a huge thing, which obviously isn't so. No, it's far more complex than that (think about literacy, social prestige of the language, national/regional identity, literary tradition as opposed to mere oral usage, internet access, and so forth).
Still I think you just need minimum number of people with knowledge in various fields of knowledge to asure quality as well as quantity. Printed encyclopedias usually are the work of hundreds of editors. Paid, professional, full-time editors, nota bene! Can we really expect to succeed with far _fewer_ editors when they contribute on a volunteer basis in their short free time?
Boris ______________________________________________________________ Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS! Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://f.web.de/?mc=021193
Boris Lohnzweiger wrote:
But what is an encyclopia supposed to be? Me, I think any encyclopedia
- printed or online - should serve as a _comprehensive_and_reliable_
source of information. Otherwhise it's useless. Imagine you go about looking up something in a printed encyclopedia only to find out it lacks some article it definetly ought to contain. I'd probably throw that book into the nearest trash can. Now how many articles does an encyclopedia need to be useful for the reader? I suppose the world's most renowned encyclopedias all contain 100,000+ articles. More compact versions do exist, but I seriously doubt that any book with less than 10,000 articles could ever provide a useful amount of information from all fields of knowledge.
To this end, you might like to look at:
[[:meta:List of articles all languages should have]] [[:simple:List of articles all languages should have]]
These are lists of a thousand or so articles that someone wanting to set up a new Wikipedia can use as a start to fill out their encyclopedia.
- d.
Hi Boris,
Thanks for your reply, both to my and to Mark's messages. There is however one thing I might disagree with you.
You compared the rural community of Seeltersk speakers with the Hopi people and pointed out that "Wat de boer niet kent, dat (vr)eet hij niet" (this proverb is also known in Dutch). Of course they are generally conservative; indeed, the conservative nature of the Saterfrisians might have saved the language from extinction for centuries! But you might forget that the world is changing, and that even rural areas, at least in Western Europe, become completely emancipated: a farmer is no longer someone whose world ends with the borders of his farmyard. At least some of them must be willing to join the project (elder people get increasingly connected to the internet ;-)), and quite all of them are nowadays aware of the unique status of their language and the necessity to preserve it and to promote it outside their own community.
Moreover, there are nowadays many youngsters who know the language. Not from their parents, who mostly raised them in Low Saxon with only very few exceptions, but at school (in the 90s schools started projects to learn their pupils Seelters), or from (one of) their grandparents, and they use it as a second language, maybe sometimes even as a first language (cf. similar movemens on the Isle of Man, or in French Flanders). These people can very well be persuated to join the project.
Wouter
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