[Foundation-l] Preservation of cultural diversity and minority languages

[Chad]

Got the money? I'd love to pursue such a goal.

-Chad

On Feb 8, 2008 7:20 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 8, 2008 6:24 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > The costs you are talking about are peanuts. Small projects do not cost us
> > much.
>
> It was a symbolic point. If other organizations want to share our
> servers, they can share in our costs. If people want the WMF to be
> pursuing all sorts of secondary goals, then they should be willing to
> pay, even if the price is only a pitance.
>
> > What it will cost is a big blue eye for the Wikimedia Foundation
> > because its relevance will be seen as reduced. Apparantly you do not see
> > that by excluding languages you exclude the points of view that these
> > languages and their associated cultures provide.
>
> And you do not see that the points of view of a culture can be
> expressed in any language. We can write about aboriginal POV in
> English, or Inuit POV in Spanish. We aren't restricted to "one
> language, one world view" per project. The true value of our projects
> is that we can communicate information about a culture in many
> languages.
>
> > When the WMF does not want to host the less and least resourced languages
> > anymore, there is no need for WMF hosting. There is no need to be treated
> > like a beggar.  There are other organisations happy to take over any
> > community that does not feel at home anymore in the Wikimedia Foundation.
> > The question will be, will these communities be granted  the right of
> > departure ??? How do you think the WMF will be perceived when communities
> > start leaving  because they do not want to be treated as second class
> > citizens ???
>
> I have thought about this, and that's why I advocate that we do not
> create projects which are destined to become second class. A little
> bit of quality control at the beginning can prevent big PR disasters
> when those projects fail. In fact, if we are worrying about public
> perception of the WMF decreasing after a fork or a split, then we
> should increase our scrutiny and decrease the amount of new language
> projects we create in the first place.
>
> Instead of creating new projects, having them fail, and then be
> absorbed by some other nameless organization, I'm saying we
> proactively create that second organization, and task it with putting
> these small languages in the forefront. Turn small languages into the
> first-class citizens by having a foundation that caters specifically
> to them.
>
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
>
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