[Foundation-l] What to do with moribund languages?

Sun Jan 4 15:50:15 UTC 2009

Hoi,
In the Wikimedia Foundation we have a division in projects like Wikipedia,
Wikisource etc. There is no such thing as a compendium and as this is not an
accepted idea. When people ask for a Wikipedia, their request is to write an
encyclopaedia. It is for the volunteers to decide what they want to write
about. There have been many people who volunteered their opinion what other
volunteers should write about. There are the 1000 most important articles
that every Wikipedia should have, I advocate people to write their Wikipedia
articles about whatever is in the (local) news, now you tell them to write
about cultural issues.

An encyclopaedia is indeed expensive, but it is not a luxury. When people
write in an encyclopaedic way about what they feel a need to write about,
they should be welcome to do this. When people write in their language about
what concerns them, what is of interest to them, you actually get the
cultural issues that are important to them.

The language policy is not judgmental in what languages should live and
which ones should not. When a language is a living language, when it
complies with the requirements, a community can have its project. This is
exactly right because in this way there are objective criteria what language
moves forward and why. This is exactly why the policy is fair. All languages
have to comply with the same requirements. It is wrong to place ourselves in
a place of judgment. All languages have their value and contribute in their
own way to what the WMF aims to do. Each community has to bear its own
burdens, every community has to pay the price for its project, its
encyclopaedia to start. Continued activity is one price for making a project
a success. Our understanding what makes a project relevant may guide a
community but they are free to make their own choices.
Thanks,
     GerardM

2009/1/4 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

> On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The notion of redundancy of articles in minority languages coming from
> you
> > Milos is painful. There is typically an article of a majority language
> that
> > arguably covers the subject best. All other articles are redundant
> because
> > you can use something like Google translate to share the benefit of the
> > best. While the article in Lower Sorbian may not be as good as the German
> or
> > Polish article, it is still part of the maze of articles that makes up
> this
> > encyclopaedic effort. Given that all projects have their room to grow, we
> > should let them and be happy when they do.
> >
> > It is not for the language committee to opine about the relative value of
> a
> > language. When it is a living language, it is eligible and when the other
> > requirements are met, it is for the people who support their project,
> their
> > language to make it as good as they can.
>
> Lower Sorbian is a good example for my point because I don't think
> that there is a native speaker of Lower Sorbian who is not a native
> speaker of German. So, I chose that for the example. There are, of
> course, other examples where the article about the Earth is necessary.
> For example, [almost] every Macedonian knows Serbian as their second
> language (a lot of them know Bulgarian, too). There is a significant
> difference between the native and the second language. [Almost] all
> Ukrainians know Russian as their native language. But, there are ~50M
> of Ukrainians, a lot of Ukrainian cultural institutions and so on; and
> they are in the position to work on articles in their language about
> quantum mechanics and similar.
>
> But, Lower Sorbian is in the completely different position. Every
> article in Lower Sorbian has cultural, not educational purpose.
> Article in Lower Sorbian about the Earth means that there is an
> article about the Earth in that language, it doesn't mean that someone
> will use it as a source of information.
>
> The point is that in such cases it is much more clever to work
> systematically on the cultural issues than build random articles on
> one encyclopedia. In such cases, having a Wiktionary (or using
> OmegaWiki for that purpose, whatever) is more important than having a
> Wikipedia, too.
>
> If we want to help to such languages, we need to share our experiences
> with native speakers. Having an encyclopedia is an expensive luxury.
> From the point of not so small language area, well educated population
> and a rich society in comparison with the most of the world, I may say
> that a good ordinary encyclopedia is beyond our cultural strength. A
> culture of the similar size has to have very rich and very well
> educated society to build ordinary encyclopedias (for example,
> Netherlands and Sweden).
>
> Wikipedia makes building encyclopedia much easier. So, it is possible
> to have a good online encyclopedia in Serbian. But, everything has
> limits. Writing articles which no one would read to search
> informations is a task without a lot of sense. It is better to try to
> find good examples of language revival, like Welsh is, and try to
> incorporate that into Wikimedia procedures, advices to for speakers of
> endangered and moribund languages. Making connections with cultural
> institutions which care about those languages may be one more good
> path.
>
> Actually, listing languages which don't have Wikimedia projects and
> making a set of advices for each of them may be a very useful task.
>
> Languages are far from being the same in the cultural sense. Because
> of that we need different approaches for different languages.
> Demanding MediaWiki localization for endangered or moribund languages
> is not reasonable. Waiting undefined amount of time for discussion is
> everything but not helping to them. So, we should think and articulate
> some kind of solution. Note, also, that Wikimedia is in a very
> specific position toward languages of the world: this is the
> institution with the best knowledge of world languages. Even there are
> just less than 300 languages, there is no other institution in the
> world which is covering in depth this number of languages.
>
> > The requirements for new projects have one aim and one aim only; to
> prevent
> > more moribund *projects*. It it painful and stupid to have Wikipedias
> that
> > never got a first article or are not in the language they are supposed to
> > be. When a language is extinct or almost extinct, we might allow for a
> > Wikisource in such a language. These are conservation projects. I have no
> > opinion if Wikisource and MediaWiki provide the appropriate environment
> for
> > such a project. I would not be surprised when other platforms do a better
> > job for such languages.
> >
> > Incubator is in and of itself a temporary affair. This is its original
> > purpose.
>
> Incubator may be used for, let's say, building a Wiktionary. Also,
> there is a sense to give to Incubator the new purpose: already
> mentioned idea of Compendium: until one project is not
> self-sustainable, it should exist at Incubator/Compendium. In a lot of
> cases, this would be a long term option.
>
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