[Foundation-l] New projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/3/21 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> On 21 March 2011 20:40, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Milos Rancic, 19/03/2011 10:45:>
>> > And there are three new Wikisource editions:
>> > * Wikisource in Sakha language [9]: http://sah.wikisource.org/
>> > * Wikisource in Sanskrit [10]: http://sa.wikisource.org/
>> > * Wikisource in Esperanto [11]: http://eo.wikisource.org/
>>
>> This is especially good news; Wikisource is actually the best project to
>> start with, for "small languages" with some written texts, IMHO.
>> (Note that there's https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26136
>> for eo.source.)
>
> As to Wikisource being a good start for a small language. I do not see why.

I do agree with Nemo here. It may not true for all languages, but it
is true for some. It makes much more sense to create a Wikisource
rather than a Wikipedia for some ancient or artificial languages,
which few or no people use for communication.

It is even more relevant and important to develop a Wikisource for
certain living languages. For example, some minorized languages in
Russia enjoyed periods of development when the political situation was
favorable, especially in the 1920s - in particular, textbooks were
written and distributed to schools and collections of original and
translated literature were published. In the periods when state
support diminished, these textbooks weren't updated anymore and the
literature books went out-of-print and became rare. In some cases the
modern community of speakers may not be strong enough to start writing
original encyclopedic articles, but it may be able to create digital
versions of existing published books; in case of textbooks, they can
also be updated and return to the schools (although Wikibooks is
probably more suited for that). This may re-ignite the interest in
that language and even if it doesn't, digitalizing these works is
desirable in any case.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore