Ray Saintonge wrote:
eG wrote:
Dear Wiktionary community,
The Japanese Wiktionary have been locked until we'd establish the basic policies. In brief, the matter was lack of motivated and dedicated contributors there. That's shame but true. Here I report the reason and background in detail.
This project has 2,000 articles and seems to be not so inactive. However, many of members think the current state is terrible. Many of articles have been edited by sock-puppets and vandal(s) who seems to be banned from Wikipedia. Most of basic policies remain untouched. We had tried to do something several times, those were failed. One of major reasons of the failure was copyright issues under Japanese law, I suppose. There are three admins but now they are inactive and two of them have expressed their will to resign, moreover, no one requested for adminship. Thus, the Wiktionary became bleak. It also might threaten novel contributors.
I'm afraid vandals and non-cooperative people waste the project if we would leave actual status. There are less motivated people than non-preferables. So I proposed the temporal closure on the Village pump. The suggestion and discussion were absolutely open. I announced it clearly on the Main page and head of Recentchanges. All of visited people must be noticed. After a week, as you know, the result was 8 supports and 1 objection. Now the oppose seems to accept this suggestion because s/he did not express opposing argument when I ascertained the request and s/he seems to be cooperative to solve the issues. After the counting, we got 4 new supports, including 1 sysop. Most of us think we have to have such policies before editing and stop to edit now. To establish those policies would be an effortful work and take long time.
This is the reason and background.
I hope my next post would be a report of re-open of the Japanese Wiktionary.
This is a regretable situation. Still I find it hard to believe that a project with only 2,000 articles would have such a problem with vandalism.
Effective policies are built up while people edit, and will often change over time. New people will want to have an opportunity to participate in the development of policies. Setting policies before people can edit may just make things more difficult.
I don't know what special problems you have with Japanese copyright law, but my experience has been that wiktionaries would have fewer problems with copyrights than wikipedias.
Ec
When reading the eG's message, I was also wondering what is so special about Japanese copyright law that it makes building up a free dictionary harder than in other languages. I must say that I do understand the problem with vandalism. Since the summer the English Wiktionary gets a lot of vandalism and spamvertising too. The months before that the problem was far less. The French, Dutch and Spanish Wiktionaries are relatively calm as far as vandalism is concerned, but maybe the Japanese Wiktionary attracts Chinese spammers as well. What I see as a solution is to create a broad base of sysops, so obvious vandalism and spamvertising can be killed on the spot (and thus only wastes the time of one person). Of course the trick is to find dependable people who are able and want to consacrate a lot of time to the project. It takes a bit of time for them to show up, but they do exist.
Good luck,
Polyglot