[Foundation-l] Please REJECT the latin wikinews project. inmediatly

[John Vandenberg]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 7:47 PM, Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Latin Wikinews? another playground?  seriously, these people (those who are
>> making the request) should concentrate on their projects in their other
>> language.
>> --
>> --alnokta
>
> Thanks, I've already concentrated 16,000 edits on to English Wikipedia. A
> Latin Wikinews would probably be less of a playground than the English
> Wikinews currently is, anyway.

And your point is?

Alnokta has over 7000 edits on Arabic Wikipedia, and we all know that
the edit count is not a good indicator of the effort that went into
making those edits.

Alnokta is suggesting that a Latin Wikinews will not be a serious
project, and that is a fair guess if the Latin Wikibooks and Latin
Wikiquote are an indicator to go by.  Even the Latin Wikisource is
struggling with almost no community interaction; it only has 10 works
with pagescans, most of which have not been transcribed, with only 150
pages of texts accompanied with a pagescan:

http://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Categoria:Index
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics

Of those 10, only one is complete, and even it hasnt been verified:

http://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Liber:De_assensione_Stoici_quid_senserint.djvu

The core extension for Wikisource, Proofread Page, is still in English:

http://la.wikisource.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Proofreadpage_index_attributes

I find it quite disturbing that people proficient in Latin/Ancient
Greek/etc are continually requesting new wiki projects in those
language, yet rarely are they participating in the Wikisource project,
which desperately needs their skills.

The Latin Wikisource community could and should be a boisterous
project, with their own Latin "Wikisource News" discussing sources and
topics of interest.  The opportunity to have a vibrant community in
the Latin language exists on four wikimedia projects, yet the project
namespace of these four projects is a wasteland.  If people who want
to work in these languages cant congregate around a project dedicated
to the works which make the language still worth studying, I doubt
that they are serious practitioners of the language.

I think a Wikinews in Latin could work, but I would rather it be
rejected until such time as the existing Latin projects have a
functioning community, as "admin-grade" contributors and community
builders that are proficient in Latin should concentrate on the
existing projects.

--
John Mark Vandenberg