[Foundation-l] What size for a minimum WP community? was: Allow new wikis in extinct languages?

[Mark Williamson]

[[Eventualism]]

:-)

On 06/04/2008, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The question is whether a newly accepted language version can really grow to
>  a respectable Wikipedia. It is not really the point whether there are native
>  speakers, how many speakers there are, whether the language is taught at an
>  university. This only means trying to find criteria that will tell us what
>  to expect from a language version.
>  Nowadays, with 2-6 years of experience, we see that
>  - among the planned languages, only Esperanto is doing well, as
>  interlinguistics could have told us before
>  - among the "ancient" languages, Latin is doing the best, but does not
>  impress. An average la.WP article has only 929 bytes, compared to 3075 bytes
>  in the Alemannic-WP. Many articles in la.WP are no real articles but rather
>  data base entries. Even poorer is the status of Anglo-Saxon-WP or Pali-WP.
>  - among the dialects or small languages of West-Germanic origin, the
>  situation is very different. My study up to now shows that only Frisian and
>  Luxemburgian do quite well, presenting to their speakers a somewhat decent
>  encyclopedia about regional subjects. Bavarian-WP is mostly a joke, often
>  trying to describe things in an amusing way.
>
>  After a survey of user communities, it seems to me that a working WP needs
>  at least 15 steady Wikipedians, who speak the language at level N (native)
>  or 4 (or 3 at least). This is true for the Frisian WP, and even more for the
>  Luxemburgian. These two West Germanic varieties do have language status, but
>  this seems to be less important, as eo.WP is quite okay, although Esperanto
>  hardly has status (but more than 60 registered users with level N or 4).
>
>  The dedication to a language also seems to be important; it often lacks when
>  a regional language is not really an unified language and when it does not
>  differ significantly from the roof language (look at the Zealandic or
>  Ripuarian WP). It is not enough an "Abstandsprache", a sociolinguist would
>  say.
>
>  On the other hand, Wikipedias with less than ten collaborators proficient in
>  the language do not really make a chance, like Upper Sorbian, or the Phantom
>  Wikipedia of Volapük (with two "speakers" of level 2 and three "speakers" of
>  level 1, but with a cunning bot programmer and 112.000 geographical stubs).
>
>  I am not sure about the right policy. I find it legitimate if a regional
>  language tries to improve a language with its speaker's community. But it
>  might be a good idea not to encourage groups of five or seven persons who
>  will not even have translated all of the MediaWiki after two years.
>
>  Ziko
>
>
>
>
>
>  --
>  Ziko van Dijk
>  Roomberg 30
>  NL-7064 BN Silvolde
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