[Foundation-l] Priorities

[SJ Klein]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Mathias Damour wrote:

> You should consider that the main cost being writing articles, it is not 
> only made for but _by_ one language speakers. I would go further and say 
> that it's not only the fact to have the content (articles) available to 
> read that helps to "save" a language but the very work to write them as 
> well.

I agree with Mathias.  The important task here is to develop communities 
interested in the creation, passionate about the use of the created work,
committed to teaching and developing the language.  You can preserve a 
truly dead language by archiving works that exist; languages that one 
hopees will survive must survive through active communities.

You can't create a community by paying a few people to write in their 
language.  This as often as not leads to conlifct with actual communities 
that exist (but aren't organized enough to announce themselves or benefit 
from such funds).

Focused effort at the level of community facilitation and development,
and global social support for this sort of preservation work, will be
more successful and scalable.

> Due to the nature of the project, people can be pleased not only to use 
> the content, but to build it, so it is a big work, but I would'nt call 
> it exactly a cost.

Indeed.  The immensity of the project is something to be proud of, to 
revel in; not something to fear or see as an obstacle.  This is one 
project which would not be nearly so interesting, and might not be 
successful at all, on a smaller scale.

Gregory Maxwell writes:
> If we must speak of doing something to save a dying language it is...
> 
> We should speak about educating people.  As soon as you've forgotten
> about the people and focused on the languages you've gone off track
> with respect to the mission.

Absolutely.  Though as you note there is a correlation; and it is 
important to have communities that encourage and support small languages 
while they are still in the 'barnraising' stage of development.  I would 
like a slightly more explicit set of wiki stages, where the very smallest 
get little attention until there is a core community to receive it; the 
small get barnraising support and attention and interwiki linking and 
style guide support; the middling size get extra vandal support and help 
during the process of developing their own policies and finding their 
first admins/bureaucrats; and the large get publicity and sister-project 
support and help setting up community newsletters and featured sections 
and dynamic main pages.  Or something.

> But to go on and say "X wikipedia is too small, we need to sponsor its
> development" when X wikipedia is small because people would rather
> write and read French, Portuguese, or English than X is an error it
> terms of fulfilling the mission and vision (see above).

You don't address the case of large languages with small wikis; and many 
speakers who have no other fluent language, but don't use wikipedia.

We could use a hotlist of language communities that obviously need support 
(active online, few secondary languages, active in non-WP communities, 
slow-growing wiki; with extra weight given to languages whose 
speakers have to overcome many obstacles to edit wikipedia, and are 
often only able to read static, offline, perhaps smuggled mirrors).

SJ
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