Hi Gerard,
In the discussion on nds, there is one thing that you do not mention and that is rather relevant.to this discussion. Sass is not a dialect, it is an orthography so nobody can claim to speak Sass. I have been told that Lower Saxon has some 200 distinct orthographies.
Now this is something that you certainly misunderstood. What Sabine wrote us was:
Some days ago I had a longer telephone conversation with one of the directors of the Institut für niederdeutsche Sprache (institute for nds) - he explained that there are at least six different acknowledged ways of writing nds and if we go to details 200 to 400 ways of writing (including also dictionaries from around 1920 etc.) can be defined - so accepting only one way of writing is a discrimination to my opinion.
So: there are at least 6 different ways that are in use. And when we look at old books you can find more. There has been some amound of standardization over the last decades. If you count every book published in Low Saxon that deviates from any of these as an orthography of its own, then you might even come up with 10000 different orthographies. Are all of these worthy of beig included into the wiktionary? Certainly not.
Heiko wants to have a resource for Sass, this has everything to do with the fact that the nds.wikipedia is Sass only.
An encyclopedia nees a certain amount of consistency. Besides you are misstating me time and again. I said that other orthographies do have their place when they are attributed properly. Which is not the case with your data that you uploaded partially, the data that is under discussion. It contains 1) some plain errors 2) come very unusual words 3) a highly inconsistent spelling, the source of which is unknown, at least to you Gerard and Sabine. (Apart from the author of the list, of course. I am speaking of the source of the orthography.)
The fact that a great resource is created for this I fully endorse. The problem is about how to treat the non-Sass content. Sabine did get permission to use a resource.
Permission. Not duty. You press so hard with this content that I wonder why you see it as your duty to have this stuff dumped into nds.wiktionary.org.
She uploaded this list onto the it and the nds wiktionary and was told by Heiko that there were many "errors" in it.
Fortunately you only uploaded part of it. It is much much more time consuming to edit the data through the web than to edit the import file in a text editor. (I do admit that I had thought about just deleting all of it and starting all over with a fresh import, but that would be out of bounds concerning my adminship. So I took the hard way with the words that you already uploaded. And please do not put errors into quotation marks.
It turned out that the words were from many resources, they should represent different orthographies all considered to be nds. Heiko started to change these entries to Sass and remove many entries as well.
1) I moved the entries 2) I marked the moved entries as "-nds-sass-" as you requested. Now please do not complain about it. 3) I deleted the obsolete redirects that were left. 4) I deleted conjucation forms which we do not need at the moment. It will be much easier to do the conjugation entries once we have a good basis. At the moment what is lacking is a good foundation. 5) this makes your statement "and remove many entries" plainly wrong.
At issue is that Sabine informed Heiko and the other people on nds.wiktionary that she is actively persuing research on this list.
An exercise in futility. She estimated 30 min of research for each entry. 1500 entries then make 750 hours of research on a low quality list.
Words have however been deleted some of them have even been identified as "Missingsch".
You can of course do with "Missingsch" (a mix-dialect somewhere between Low Saxon and Standard German) whatever you like. (To my preference outside of nds.wiktionary.org.) But please attribute the entries as such. I will not do that for you. I will just care about Low Saxon at the moment.
Now this is something I do not apreciate at all.
I did not appreciate your upload.
Words that are only indicated as nds have no clear pedigree and have a limited use.
In another mail you criticized me when I forgot to state nds-sass after the move. You said without proper attribution the words are useless. I move them to a proper place. (Just an edit. This is what "move" is for.) I attribute the underlying orthography. And I then do delete the remaining empty redirect. (Which to my understanding is not a misuse of adminship.) Whatever is useless (even to your definition) can be deleted. This is done all over wiki-world.
When they have been identified as something specific, they can be attributed to one of the orthographies or even to non nds dialects.
Right. Exactly. Once you come up with some data to back up your words, feel free to add them again.
When atributed these words make valuable content. This is given the confusion that results from the lack of standardisation in nds not unrealistic. Heiko is aware that Sabine puts real effort in her research and I am disapointed that he has deleted many words regardless.
At the moment these words are absolutely useless. Once the Low Saxon speaking world finds our wiktionary (with the mess we are currently cleaning up) our credibility would be gone.
On a more positive note, Heiko and I are cooperating in creating a template that he will use for uploading a large number of nds-sass content. This will facilitate the inclusion of the nds-wiktionary data in the Ultimate Wiktionary..
Yes, this is a positive step indeed. And I do apologize for anything that I have stated too harsh. This template is something that I really long for, and I think it will improve the work a lot. Besides I can really live with non-Sass-content, as long as it is properly attributed and as long as there is a possibility for the user to find his way through all the data.
Just a summary of what I want 1) I want to see the data of Werner be converted to Sass, entered as such (properly marked). I am willing to put a lot of effort in that. 2) I want to add quite a number of words coming from the translation of KDE (Linux) to Low Saxon. For all that I need a reliable template that makes sure the data can be reused in the UW. 3) I do appreciate all your efforts in researching the origin of Werners words. I do however consider that a waste of time. (But not of my time.) 4) I want to move the existing entries to Sass. They would then be properly attributed. This is something within my reach. I know the Sass-orthography well enough to do that. 5) I personnaly will not help in attributing the data as it is in Werners list. I cannot help with that, because it is far beyond my reach. I consider that data to be internally inconsistent. I can back this claim up and I think I have done so. You can, however do so, if you like. 6) I do not want to see Werners list without rework in the nds.wiktionary.org. Especially not with the label "nds". You can reenter Werners words once you find a matching orthography. You can check all 200 if you like. From my understanding of Low Saxon that will be a hard job. And that I really do not know is to whose service this will be. What are the users supposed to do with all those words that might conicide with spelling A, B, C, D and varying in each entry. Who is supposed to learn Low Saxon from that? Wouldn't it be much better to A) let us from nds.wiktionary.org (it is not just me who thinks this way over Werners list) work through the list, move everything to a proper place B) (a job for you, if you like) to dig for high quality material in other dialecs of Low Saxon, especially concerning westphalian and to work on that? The usual spellings in LS are much less different that you keep stating. And we should really discuss which ones we really need in order to provide some benefit to the user. But what is really lacking is a bit of coverage on Westphalian. Sass is based on Noordneddersassisch, which covers Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, Schleswig Holstein and the western part of Mecklenburg. Westphalian is different in some interesting ways and it really deserves some coverage. I really do not understand why you are putting so much effort into Werners list. Is ist just because we got it for free and you just dislike the criticism that you earned for that? After all it is not the language that you speak (Dutch) nor the language of Sabine (South Germany). Of course you are free to work in Low Saxon regardless of your mother lanaguage. (Please do not misunderstand me here.) I would just like to know why this list is so dear to your heart that you put in so much effort in defending it. I have been wondering about that for quite some time now, but so far I really do not know. If I came up with a word list in Zeews or Frisian or Maori and proposed to upload it (all languages that I do not speak), and several people proficient in that language told me that this list is highly problematic and if they offered to work through that list, I would just say: thank you for saving me so much of my valuable time: Take the list, improve it, put it into the wiktionary afterwards. If you need technical help, I will help you. I will have a look at it every now and then and I would proceed to another project or another word list or to implementing more functionality in the UW or whatever. Instead you just put in hour after hour in defending a list, just hoping that you will find some way for backing it up. You do not even bother to go in the details. We could tell you quite a lot about the possible origins of the (mis)spellings. We could explain the underlying phonetics to you. We could tell you about different orthographies for LS and how they came into existence, etc. But you are not at all interested in a discussion about the data itself.
OK, this mail has become much longer than I intended, and it is much to late tonight.
Just be assured that I am not interested in a war over word lists. Let us find some peaceful settelment to all this and go back to work.
One technical question: which program will you use for importing? Will it be based on pywikipediabot/wiktionary.py? How will you be able to import conjucation tables? Is that something that we will have to program fresh anyway?
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann