2005/11/8, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) rowikipedia@yahoo.com:

While not being the primary aim, supporting endangered languages is one way through which Wikipedia is contributing to human knowledge... it's preserving a very important element of human culture. As soon as we stray away from that goal, Wikipedia loses its special status, by becoming yet another encyclopedia.

I disagree. "Supporting endangered languages" is not what makes Wikipedia special. "Direct contribution" is.

Raphael Wiegand said, "We are (or better we want to be) a project trying to set up an encyclopedia everyone can access and understand and nothing else."

This is wrong, in my opinion. While writing an encyclopedia is the primary aim, I think we can also achieve the secondary aim of protection for minority languages, all of which contribute to Wikipedia's breadth of knowledge. Having a complete encyclopedia in 40 languages is a good thing. Having an encyclopedia in 250 languages is an excellent one.

It depends. If it is an encyclopedia in 40 languages and a few pages in 200 more, I don't see it as much of an improvement. If those 250 languages are just 40 languages unnecessarily split out, I don't see it as much of an improvement either. We can easily add 2 or 3 languages with several hundreds of thousands of articles each by taking the English Wikipedia and putting it through American, British, Australian or whatever spell-checkers. But I don't think it would improve Wikipedia much, to say the least. I am all for having Wikipedia in minority languages, but I also think there are boundaries; I don't think it's a good thing to promote each dialect to a minority language deserving its own Wikipedia. 1 Wikipedia in a language with 100,000 articles is in my opinion more useful than 5 Wikipedias with 20,000 articles each.

The other thing that makes me worried is the growing pressure on new language contributors. We must remember that Wikipedians are *volunteers* and most, except vandals, are always adding knowledge to the community. Pressuring them into reaching a certain guideline for their language is abuse, in my opinion. If only because we're abusing their love for their language - their desire to promote it - by forcing them to meet ever more stringent guidelines for setting up Wikipedias in new languages. New contributors must be encouraged, not discouraged.

Yes, but encouraged to do what? In my opinion it's better to encourage them to contribute to some existing Wikipedia than to encourage them to set up their own. One thing that's so great about Wikipedia is that many people are cooperating on a single project. This leads to a much better Wikipedia than having people create their own project and calling it Wikipedia. I know, I'm going into the extreme now, but it's still good to have rules to avoid those extremes.

I think making a subdomain a privelege is nonsensical. Wikipedia is not like free web hosting - it's not the one giving away free stuff. The contributors are giving away their time and knolwedge freely for Wikipedia!

Still, I prefer them to do that in an existing Wikipedia rather than getting a Wikipedia for themselves with a few friends, and work on it there.

Which is why I propose that we take a second to look into the problem with a bit of perspective, and realise the depth that minority languages have added to Wikipedia. As I said before, it's one thing to say you've got an encyclopedia in German, and another to say you've got one in Samogitian, or in Voro, or in Aromanian.

And yet another to say you got it in North, South and West Bostonian...

For a new language to be formed, I think the present policy is good enough. A community should be demonstrated, and a test wiki should be founded, but nothing more than that. Otherwise, we risk discouraging new contributors who are insipring people that are full of enthusiasm. Otherwise Wikipedia becomes elitist (or is that word too controversial to use in the Wikipedia context!?!)

I disagree. If a new contributor loses enthousiasm because he cannot create his own Wikipedia in his own local dialect, but has to work in the more official language instead, or in a Wikipedia grouping dialects together, then I'm not sure whether their enthousiasm is so much wanted. And if that is elitist, then let me be elitist, but I think saying that your pet project can be part of Wikipedia only if you write it in some language with regular written communication is not that much of a restriction...

-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

Thank you for this one - there are many points in here I fully support - sorry, I don't have much time to follow up things here, but be sure I support the projects for minority or rare languages.

Ciao, Sabine

Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) wrote:

Hi,

I think the recent discussion here shows a very worrying recent trend in Wikipedia: growing intolerance towards the diversity of the community and a growing distancing of Wikipedia's original community structure: a free community that was known for doing things differently.

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