[Foundation-l] A successful request not yet fulfilled

[Luiz Augusto]

On 4/2/07, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Due to past conversations I have had with people
> involved with incubator, I read the comment about
> "merging processes" differently than you did.  Perhaps
> I am mistaken, and that is not what was meant in this
> case.
>
> However there are people who have been clear with me
> that they think  [[:oldwikisource:]] should be
> completely merged into [[:incubator:]] in the long
> term.


With long term you is trying to say "starting at the 2859 year"? If yes, it
is fine to me. The world have more than 5,000 languages and the Wikimedia
Foundation at this time have 63 Wikipedias, the most google-friendly
project, with less than 100 articles [1]. I think that the [[:incubator:]]
is a temporary hosting, not a hosting for someone trying to found more
people speaking on a specific language that have Internet access, knows
something related to free culture, historical texts, OCRing and wiki culture
like [[:oldwikisource:]] is for some languages.

Personally I don't like to see the process of
> starting new Wikisources taken over, because outside
> people simply fail to appreciate the reality of
> wikiSOURCE, where the content already exists in
> tangible form (with corresponding dialects and
> orthographies already pre-determined for each edition
> of a text).  Processing requests at meta has led to
> people being encouraged to start a new wikisource for
> a variation of a language without ever trying to work
> in the existing wiki (or even talking to them). [1]
> The people I have spoken to from incubator also seem
> unable to see the intrinsic differences between a
> wikisource and a wikipedia.  From what I can see they
> are planning a one-size fits all process, with no
> differences in handling based on projects.  Despite
> the fact that there are strong arguments for having
> one Wikisource where there are several Wikipedias with
> related languages.  If plans have changed, or I am
> simply mistaken, please correct me.
>
> [1]
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_new_languages/Ancient&diff=prev&oldid=360204
>
> The full page seems to have been lost on meta, so I
> linked one of my contributioins there


My propose is a attempt of a {{merge}} between the current Wikisource
Multilingual policy + langcom policy + proposed policies to the Wikisource
Multilingual [2].

The problem is the pun "Wikimedia" naming the foundation. The press
generally ignores the others projects due to it. Google and Yahoo! sometimes
aren't friendly with theirs search results for non-Wikipedia projects,
specially for non-English languages. The Wikimedia Foundation tries to do
attention to all projects, but sometimes Wikipedia suck all of their energy
due to the media coverage to Wikipedia and the lack of media coverage for
non-Wikipedia projets. The result: users with only basic knowledge thinks
that Wiktionary is a mini-Wikipedia with the same rules and needs, Wikibooks
is a Wikipedia for big articles and the Wikisource is the big trashcan for
texts that newbies adds to the Wikipedia articles.

Moving the requests to the Meta-Wiki is IMHO the best solution because:

* You don't need to someone remeber the existence of a wiki that may have
requests for new languages placed on then, neither to prays to someone check
that page/wiki regularly during the small amout of seconds per month that
Wikipedia isn't sucking all attention
* You can simply vote as against on meta if no one is placing text-units on
the correct place (specially if something on [2] may give a chance to move
from proposal to policy)
* You stop the behaviour "let's go to the [[:oldwikisource:]] only to vote
for new languages and to delete old stuff" specially because you can vote as
against if no one is adding texts neither in the right place neither in the
wrong place, again specially if something on [2].... forcing to that wiki
having someone rather than Volapuk and India national languages speakers
adding periodically new texts.


[1] - http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php

[2] -
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikisource-l/2007-April/000224.html