[Foundation-l] [Langcom-l] Ancient Greek reconstructed an analysis of a proposal for a new Wikipedia

[Pharos]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)
<pathoschild at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Further, I've painstakingly followed every thread in this discussion,
>  and I have not seen any strong argument for allowing languages nobody
>  uses natively. Wikimedia wikis exist to make the sum of human
>  knowledge available to everyone, not to practice or preserve
>  languages.
>
>  I think the argument that they act as a common language for scholars
>  of the ancient language is not valid; we are not a forum for academic
>  exchange.

You have to remember that "everyone" includes people who consider
written-only languages a part of their intellectual sphere.  If
Wikimedia was around 500 years ago, would we deny Latin for purely
ideological reasons, even though it was very widely used in
literature?  And though that use has declined greatly for Latin and
similar classical languages, I do not think we can say that such a use
is dead, nor can we at all predict the future course for such
languages.

And is it not true that certain topics are best researched in certain
languages?  If one were to collect writers from around the world to
write an encyclopedia article on medieval ecclesiastical history,
based on the most relevant and important sources, would not the
optimal language for collaboration be Latin?  And if one were to write
an encyclopedia article on early 20th century artificial languages,
would not the optimal language for collaboration be Esperanto?

Surely such articles, written in one context but translated into many
other languages, would be very valuable to all of our Wikipedia
editions.

Not that I agree with Gerard's specific proposal, but the case for
Wikipedias in written-only languages is quite clear to me.

Thanks,
Pharos