[Foundation-l] Belarusan Wikipedia

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2007/3/31, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> Tomasz Ganicz schreef:
> > 2007/3/31, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com>:
> >
> >> On 31/03/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 3/31/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 3/31/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>> Nor is it closed; it lives at
> >>>>>> http://be-x-old.wikipedia.org/
> >>>>>>
> >>>>> Living in a vegetative, comatose fashio, though. The database is locked.
> >>>>>
> >>>> It shouldn't be. I'll try to figure out what's going on there.
> >>>>
> >>> Ah, apparently a misunderstanding; Brion thought a move to "be-x-old"
> >>> was meant to imply that it is an archive of the existing Wikipedia.
> >>> The "old" refers to the orthography, not the wiki.
> >>>
> >>> I have asked him to remove the lockfile; both wikis should be editable
> >>> now. Mind you, it might be a good idea to merge them, to kill one of
> >>> them, or whatever. This is for the community to work out, and I'm not
> >>> going to have us impose a preference for any solution.
> >>>
> >>> For now, the only thing we have authorized the LangCom to decide is
> >>> what the language codes for the respective versions should be if they
> >>> are to be separate. *Not* to close or lock wikis. That is not within
> >>> the authority of the LangCom.
> >>>
> >> Thanks for clearing this up. I think the unannounced lock was one of
> >> the main points of confusion and contention among the community.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > I am wondereing what has happened with all interwiki links which were
> > pointing to the old version. As the old version was two times larger
> > than the new one many interwiki points to the non-existing pages. Even
> > the still existing ones sometimes point to nowhere as the old spelling
> > of them is slightly different the new one. What is the interwiki code
> > for old version?
> > This especially affected Polish Wikipedia, as we have a lot of
> > articles about cities and villages in Biellaruss, as well as the
> > Biellarusian VIPs, but I expect many other Wikipedias are affected as
> > well.
> >
> > And again I am repeating my old questions. Did the LangComm contacted
> > any experts from outisde before this decission was made, or just
> > decided on the basis of short and probably biased discussion on meta?
> Hoi,
> The pywikipedia bot has a program that allows you to change strings ..
> so you can replace "[[be:" with "[[be-x-old".
>
> As to your question, the situation was stark and obvious. The official
> orthography was not accepted. Now the be code does stand for Belarus.
> The current situation is however not really acceptable. Both wikipedias
> should integrate. The current situation with two projects is horrid it
> will result in two biased projects.
>

But the true is that there is around 4 million people who really speak
Belarusian as their mother tongue and vast majority of them are using
old version. It is true that the new version is tough in schools in
Belarus, but this country is really strange in terms of language, as
the Belarusian is a minority language in Belarus. Vast majority of
people, including president of this country and most of goverment
officials does not speak Belarusian and they prefer Russian. Even most
of the Belarusian law acts are curently originaly writen in Russian.
In Minsk in 2006 only 15% of students of primary and secondary schools
decided to learn Belarusian as it is not obligatory subject in
schools. So, the question is what really matters in this case? Is it
important which version of language is though in the govermental
schools in the country, where only minority of people use this
language or rather which version is prefered by majority of people
really using this language? I ask again - did the LangComm checked
which version is used by majority of people for whom Belariusian is
their main, mother tongue? You could for example ask for this experts
from US or German universities, who specialize in history and current
state of this language.

Wikipedias are not country located but language oriented. If they
would be country located the be Wikipedia should be writen rather in
Russian than in Belarusian, or it should be bilingual with majority of
Russian speaking users...

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html