[Foundation-l] Fwd: Pt-Portuguese Wikipedia

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> Having two wikipedias for the same language is not allowed within the rules
> of the language policy. The premise that an article on the
> pt.wikipedia.orgis in Portuguese Portuguese is a fallacy. It would be
> the same as stating
> that every article on the English language Wikipedia is in American English.
> It is not.
>
> Milos in his reply is looking for a way out of this conundrum by technical
> means; effectively a tool that translates from one form of Portuguese into
> the other. Such a solution is for instance in use at the Serbian Wikipedia
> where the language is transliterated from Cyrillic into Latin script and the
> other way around.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
>   

I think it may be useful to note that the policy page on the the
Portuguese wikipedia looks to the casual observer as if the
folks on that wikipedia have expended some considerable
thought on how to do this in the best possible manner:


http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vers%C3%B5es_da_l%C3%ADngua_portuguesa


FWIW I do agree that of all the options the worst one would
be to split into two projects. It could easily turn out that
50 % of European Portuguese speakers kept editing the
old project, or even that only say a 10 % fringe group
started editing the new European Portuguese only
project. That would be a farce.

Speaking only for myself, I don't think a word substitution
solution should be tried either, except as a very last resort,
with a very strong community consensus that that is the
only way forward. To me it seems from the policy page
linked above, that the contributors themselves of that
community have thought things out for themselves pretty
well. Of course I have not followed the Portuguese wikis
community closely, so I may be very wrong, in which
case there shouldn't be a problem for the wikis rough
majority consensus to emerge, and action to be taken
based on that.

But in any case, nothing at all should be based on a single
voice, there needs to be a multiplicity of viewpoints considered
and consensus decision making employed.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen