[Foundation-l] Introduction to the internal workings ofthelanguage subcommittee

[Stephen Bain]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Brian McNeil
<brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:
>
> I think perhaps where we're losing the plot here is the focus on Wikipedia
> projects. What about a Wikisource in Latin? The vast corpus of classical
> works in the language could be incorporated and made widely available.

This is an important point, and it has been raised in some of the
earlier discussions on this subject. Wikiquotes and Wiktionaries too,
along with Wikisources.

> However, I feel
> that with some of the high standards set for interface translation there is
> a risk that, putting Wikipedia aside, if you start a Latin Wikibooks,
> Wikiquotes, or Wikiversity, then you'll never have enough messages
> translated to do the others (per rules) because you need to invent words.

This would be a stumbling block, yes. Perhaps a multilingual approach,
in the vein of Commons, would be best for "dead" language projects, or
perhaps modern languages could be used on projects that are designated
as belonging to "dead" languages. Maybe even combination projects
could be considered to facilitate this (Wikisource Ancient Germanic
languages, for example, could be established with a priority of making
the interface available in major modern Germanic languages).

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com