[Foundation-l] Fwd: Tokipona

[Andre Engels]

2008/1/21, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com>:

> Good questions, all, and I think it deserves a good reply. As far as I
> am concerned, a language (constructed or natural) is worthy of having
> a wiki project under one of two conditions:
> 1) If the language has a large number of natural speakers. A wiki
> project can be used to faciliate communication and the sharing of
> information among these people
> 2) If the language has a large number of secondary-speakers. In this
> case, the language can be used to faciliate the share of information
> between people who are not able to communicate directly using their
> natural languages.

I would put 2) even stricter: We should only count secondary-speakers
for which the language can reasonably be expected to have a Wikipedia
of similar or larger size than their first language. Someone with
English as their first language would not have much use of the
Esperanto Wikipedia, since they can get all and more on the English
Wikipedia. But apart from the few first-language Esperanto speakers
there are plenty of second-language speakers whose first language is
not in the top-10 Wikipedia languages. For them there might be
considerable material in Esperanto that's not in their first language.

> Latin: Has few (but some) primary speakers, and a large number of
> secondary speakers. However, Latin may be problematic for other
> reasons besides these. Latin doesnt have words for many "modern"
> concepts that are worth discussing, and many people who know latin are
> familiar with different forms of latin (latin for catholic mass, dog
> latin, etc).

I disagree with those objections. There are Latin words created for
modern terms by the Catholic church. And there are different forms of
Latin, but I am unconvinced that those differences are more
problematic than (for example) the differences between European and
Brazilian Portuguese.

> Just because you or I speak a particular language doesnt mean that
> it's important in the global sense, or that it is useful in spreading
> information. Small languages, including small conlangs and natural
> languages, can be a very large barrier to communication simply because
> not enough people choose to write it, and few people are able to read
> it. Having large numbers of articles, especially poor-quality or
> bot-generated articles (especially in the case of Volapuk) is not
> really a counter-argument to this point.

My opinion would be that a Wikipedia in a language should be there to
give information to its readers. If there are few or no readers, that
will not work out. I have strong doubts to that for Klingon or
tokipona, but also to for example Anglo-Saxon and to a lesser extent
volapük and Latin. I get the idea that those are made by people for
the fun of writing and reading in those languages rather than
primarily as a means of communication. Having fun writing and reading
in some language is a valid aim, but not one that Wikipedia is for.


-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels