[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

[Luiz Augusto]

multi-replying,

On Dec 26, 2007 9:47 PM, Matthew Britton <matthew.britton at btinternet.com>
wrote:

> Luiz Augusto wrote:
> > * Some Meta contributors versus the 19{{citation}} speakers that aren't
> yet
> > joined to the project
>
> I think the use of the word "yet" here says a lot about this project.
>
> To be honest, Volapuk is lucky to even have a Wikimedia wiki; the other
> wikis in constructed languages with no native speakers (e.g. Klingon and
> Toki Pona) have all been closed, and it seems to be an established rule
> that no new ones will be accepted. There must be dozens if not hundreds
> of constructed languages with 20 or more speakers, none of which would
> be deemed suitable for a wiki if one was proposed today.


Klingon and Toki Pona are constructed languages with copyright issues around
then. Esperanto (eo) is a constructed language and is a active project with
92k articles on their Wikipedia. There are also hundreds of natural
languages with less of 50 survivors speakers with no wikis (and no bots to
upload texts to then ;-) ), so I think that the issue is more related to the
smallest languages in general.

I personally have nothing against the project's continued existence.
> However, we work by consensus here. If people want to give their
> opinions, air their concerns, or propose measures to remedy this
> situation, they should be encouraged to do so, and not met with
> complaints that Wikimedia is somehow being unfair to small projects.
>
> -Gurch
>

I fully agree to your mention to consensus. But I don't see a consensus on
the previous closure request that the problem is the bot-generated articles,
so, I don't see a reason to a groups of users starting that kind of
discussion on Meta-Wiki.



On Dec 26, 2007 9:53 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> At least one good criteria for deciding whether a particular Wikipedia
> is justified would be the existence of a community of native speakers
> (community interpreted expansively). Dead language 'pedias don't seem
> to serve the purpose of preservation of knowledge and access to it. Is
> there a Latin or Aramaic Wikipedia? We should treat tiny languages
> with no native speakers in the same manner.
>

Well, you are preserving the existence of a language, in others words, you
are preserving knowledge with knowledge written in that language. A few
digression: imagine I getting fun learning a language with less than 10
speakers and getting fun writing a translation bot that perfectly translates
texts on that language. Imagine my bot spamming the [[:oldwikisource:]] (
wikisource.org/wiki/ incubator + coordination wiki for Wikisources) with
translations of the entire Project Gutenberg on that language. If I find out
more speakers of that smallest language, should I:

* Request a new wikisource wiki to move all of these texts and start working
with those people

or

* Keep all on [[:oldwikisource:]]

or

* Delete all pages and ban myself for uploading materials with no function

?