Hi Sabine, hi everyone,
But let's talk about minor languages. We have some difficulties on the nds wiktionary - people think that the only way to write correct is following the Sass ortography. 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. They all need to be accepted - the important thing is that there is a distinction from one to the other. How we could achieve this - in the actual wiktionary signing all non classified words just with nds. Words that can be classified receive nds-ABC, nds-DEF, nds-SASS, nds-xyz. So not only the single term is to be classified, but also the definition (if possible) - if it is not classified there's simply no reference to a certain class.
This is not a correct representation of the discussion that we had. 1) we said want all Low Saxon entries to be classified as -nds- 2) we said that there should be a possibility to list dialect and spelling variations within one entry. But for that we need a structure that does not break your automatic im-/export to other wiktionarys. Using nds-sass as a main entry will not do it. We want to have a list of frequent other spellings below the nds heading. As far as I remember, this problem has been mentioned in our talk page, but so far there has not been a proposal from your side. I would like to see something like Article: xy -nds- * Meaning * Meaning Variations * xya( Sass, Harte) * xyb (Lindow) * xyc (etc..)
3) we do in fact not want to treat all spelling variations on one level. Minor variations should be clearly marked as such. Low Saxon is in a bad state at the moment and people who want to learn Low Saxon need some kind of guidance about which spelling is common and which is not. Wiktionary is not a means to elevate little used spellings into something official.
4) the main problem is a discussion that we had about a list that you wanted to import. This list is available for us for free, but it contains a lot of doubtful entries. We had offered to go through this list and solve the major problems. (This process is underway. Besides: it could go on faster, if you just sent us the data again in a textformat that does not break special characters, like zipped unicode.) We (the majority on nds.wiktionary.org) are only willing to accept words that conform to some standard. But the list contains lots of entries that (at least to our understanding) do not conform to any standard. They are a very private opinion of the author. (And then this list was mirrored to about 4 other places in the web.) This (to our understanding) does not turn these spellings errors into an accepted spelling. Another thing is that the original author of this list is not available (as you said). This means that we have no chance to discuss the problematic issues with the author. But you now just want to treat this list as a fact. As I said before to Gerard: the wiktionary is not a dump for all the bad spelling that you can find on the web. We are indeed open to different spellings, but for certain forms that we think to be wrong according to all standards, we just want proof that this is indeed a valid and used spelling. A reference in a Low Saxon dictionary (of whatever spelling) would be helpful. Until then, these words will not be imported into nds.wiktionary.org, or at least they will not be imported until there is a general consensus in nds.wiktionary.org about how to deal with the problem.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann