Forwarding Marcos' email. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Marcos Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com Date: Oct 10, 2017 10:37 PM Subject: Re: [Langcom] Request for closure of Nahuatl Wikipedia To: "Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee" langcom@lists.wikimedia.org, "Milos Rancic" millosh@gmail.com Cc:
(not sure I have the ability to post here but I wanted to comment although I am not a member of the committee)
This raises some issues that have been bubbling up since the beginning of NAH Wikipedia. In Mexico there is a very particular type of racism or prejudice where classical indigenous cultures and languages are upheld as ideals to aspire to, while modern indigenous cultures and people are minimized. This seems to have been the theme since the beginning. Over one million people are native speakers of Náhuatl. This Wikipedia was never intended for them, and any and all input from native speakers or people advocating for modern indigenous perspectives to be considered has been summarily ignored and excluded. Non-speakers (NAH-0 and NAH-1) have been so rigid in their insistence on adherence to Classical Náhuatl norms (which they are, ironically, not proficient in anyways) that I once got into an edit war with a user who insisted on changing the orthography loanword "rock" (as in "rock n roll") to "rocq", which is more extreme than even Spanish (the source of Classical Náhuatl orthography) and unknown by actual Náhuatl speakers.
Mexico and Central America have large indigenous populations that include prolific and active writers in indigenous languages. It is a shame that Wikipedia has not been able to be part of strategies for indigenous language maintenance in this region, in spite of serious efforts from Yucatec Maya speakers to create a Wikipedia and repeated attempts of Náhuatl speakers to influence the direction of the "Náhuatl Wikipedia"
On Oct 10, 2017 12:32 PM, "Maor Malul" maor_x@zoho.com wrote:
Hello,
We have received a request for closure of the Nahuatl Wikipedia:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projec ts/Closure_of_Nahuatl_Wikipedia_2
Interestingly, the user who is requesting it has been blocked from it in 2016, as well from other three Wikipedias.