Hi, I suppose this is a mail that Brian can answer (nooo ... don't kill me ... I know you are overloaded with work).
On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people talk.
Now as much as I understand the namespace manager could help us in that.
We could create namespaces for:
*standardised Neapolitan *phonetic Neapolitan (at the moment, this would have the majority of articles at the moment) *language A (attributed to the NAP language group) *language B (attributed to the NAP language group) etc.
The mainpage would then become a page that leads to the several namespaces where the NAMESPACE:Main_page would actually hold the main page of that specific namespace and that could be different according to contents etc.
So is the namespace manager made for such an approach? If yes, this really helps us a lot since we do not need a single wikipedia for each of these languages, we do not need to have more than one or two persons to contribute to a language and this way these few people can start to create contents and others will follow by time. It would not delude people who join the projects just to be able to work in their language and then see the possibility denied, since very often it is easier to decide on a local level if something is to be considered "so different" to be a separate language or just a local variety that should go into the phonetic part (for example this would be the case for "Maiorese, the Neapolitan spoken in Maiori - it is different from Neapolitan of Naples, but it is easy to be understood by Neapolitans ... it is just a different way to pronounce words, but not having a standardised way of writing you can imagine that people from Maiori write a different Neapolitan than people from Naples).
Another advantage of having groups of languages on one wiki is that organising and administration becomes more effective and less time consuming - this does not mean that we should merge big wikis (this would be problematic- there are already too many edits to really be able to really check everything) - but wikis of a certain "language group region" or maybe languages with different writing standards (like nds for example) there it would make sense.
Well I need to answer an e-mail of the Neapolitan discussion group and therefore it would be helpful to know if this was possible or not.
Thanks!!!
Best, Sabine
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Sabine Cretella wrote:
On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people talk.
Now as much as I understand the namespace manager could help us in that.
We could create namespaces for: *standardised Neapolitan *phonetic Neapolitan (at the moment, this would have the majority of articles at the moment) *language A (attributed to the NAP language group) *language B (attributed to the NAP language group) etc.
The mainpage would then become a page that leads to the several namespaces where the NAMESPACE:Main_page would actually hold the main page of that specific namespace and that could be different according to contents etc.
If I understand this correctly, this would also help for languages with different scripts like Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) which is written in either Roman or Hebrew script. With this we could have different namespaces for each script (orthography), interlink between scripts, etc.
-- Carlos Thompson
"Carlos Thompson" chlewey@cable.net.co wrote in message news:002901c62128$d3b9dea0$0601a8c0@thompson.local...
Sabine Cretella wrote:
On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people talk.
Can these languages not use the same written forms? I could understand the problem if you were speaking to each other aloud, but what does this have to do with the written text?
If they do not use exactly the same written forms, can they easily be "translated"? (see below)
If I understand this correctly, this would also help for languages with different scripts like Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) which is written in either Roman or Hebrew script. With this we could have different namespaces for each script (orthography), interlink between scripts, etc.
There's a utility on the Chinese Wikipedia which converts back-and-forth between Traditional and Simplified.
I believe that steps are being taken to enable this to be used for some Eastern European languages which can use Latin or Cyrillic scripts.
This enables an article to be "written" in either script, and read back in either. This would presumably be more helpful than splitting articles.
HTH HAND
Phil Boswell wrote:
"Carlos Thompson" chlewey@cable.net.co wrote in message news:002901c62128$d3b9dea0$0601a8c0@thompson.local...
Sabine Cretella wrote:
On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people talk.
Can these languages not use the same written forms? I could understand the problem if you were speaking to each other aloud, but what does this have to do with the written text?
If they do not use exactly the same written forms, can they easily be "translated"? (see below)
They could if there was a standardised form. Without such standardisation is it is not possible. Within the Neapolitan language GROUP there are variants that qualify as a /language /when you accept that a language is different from another when people speaking one do not understand the other.
A language is not only about how you write things, it is also vocabulary, grammar and stuff. They do not use the same written forms.
If I understand this correctly, this would also help for languages with different scripts like Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) which is written in either Roman or Hebrew script. With this we could have different namespaces for each script (orthography), interlink between scripts, etc.
There's a utility on the Chinese Wikipedia which converts back-and-forth between Traditional and Simplified.
I believe that steps are being taken to enable this to be used for some Eastern European languages which can use Latin or Cyrillic scripts.
This enables an article to be "written" in either script, and read back in either. This would presumably be more helpful than splitting articles.
HTH HAND
It is well known that this utility exists. However as I understand it, Chinese is a written language that is largely divorced from the spoken language. While some Eastern European languages are seen by some as being identical, it is denied by many of the people who live there. Having a tool for Chinese does not mean that you can use the same took for Judeo-Spanish, the number of people speaking Chinese or the "Eastern European" languages is vastly different.
When you allow for articles to be started in a namespace according to a script used, you can still do all the technical machinations when they are available. I think it was Danny who once said that there are multiple ways in which a Hebrew text can be written. I think it helps when you can identify text to how they were originally written. Using a namespace is one way of accomplishing it. Articles are not split this way any more than an English article is split from a Dutch or a French article.
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