[Foundation-l] On Arabic and sub-language proposals.

[Muhammad Alsebaey]

I had 3 concerns (per my original email). One of them was duplication of
efforts which is not a concern anymore for me.

The other 2 were those dialects being mostly spoken with no stable
orthography, and the third to requote here was:

It wont be hard to imagine groups interested in promoting this canvassing
just to prove their point, do we want to get involved in such an argument?
is it wikipedia's place to? isnt such a statement already made by Wikimedia
creating one of the first bodies of written text in the language?

I dont care whether the argument in my country goes whichever way, my
concern is *NOT* political as such (if you meant by that whether If I am on
either side of this fence), I have been called by Gerard 'a champion of
standard Arabic' , which is not true, I dont oppose Masry or the others
because I think Arabic is 'best'.  I just dont think WMF should take a
stance. and *changing* the status quo is doing so. Why do we claim we are a
secondary source of information? for the exact same reasons IMHO. In my
mind, the best way to go about those languages is wait and see if their
actual speakers adopt them as written and THEN grant them wikipedias. i.e,
have one of the rules (beside having the sacred ISO code) be ' The proposers
should point to a substantial body of written literature' or something like
that.

Also, the canvassing goes back to Aphaia's point, If people will be writing
on this wp just to prove a point, there is bound to be heavy systemic bias
created not just by the normal bias of the population of editor, but rather,
by the fact that the language itself is in the middle of reforming.


On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 1:40 AM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:

> Muhammad Alsebaey wrote:
> > It is not a political stand that the first body of written non-fiction
> work
> > published in Egyptian Arabic will be on Wikipedia? I said before that
> there
> > is an ongoing debate in Egypt about the adoption of Egyptian Arabic as
> > written in addition to being spoken in order to bolster the national
> > identity of Egypt. This debate is currently dead in the water AFAIK, with
> a
> > lot of argument going for and against. Wikipedia hosting the first
> > non-fiction written work *is* a political stand in this debate IMHO.
> >
> >
> No, in no way. You must simply understand that we do not make decisions
> because one politiker want something is true or another politiker want
> something to be wrong. If your concern is a political, then I give
> Gerard right. We follow international standards. If you have a problem.
> Go to ISO and complain there.
>
> Ting
>
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-- 
Best Regards,
Muhammad Alsebaey