[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Svip]

2009/8/21 Ole Palnatoke Andersen <palnatoke at gmail.com>:
> I assume that your contributions have been made under another username
> or anonymously, as I do not recall seeing anything from Bruger:Svip.

My username on all Wikimedia wikis is "Svippong".  Svip was unfortunately taken.

2009/8/21 dex2000 <sir48 at lite.dk>:
> The merits of localization aside, making localization for the Danish Wiki a
> reason for its lagging behind the other Nordic Wikis is really beside the
> point. As an old-timer on da:, I can confirm that meeting untranslated or
> bad messages on the Danish Wikipedia is a very unusual experience.

Well, I did some time ago run into a very strange writing "the bot"
(which translated as "botten", which made it make even less sense if
it hadn't been translated) and a word like "start" was misspelt as
"stard".

> For the record, the Danish Wikipedia is doing fine. I¨m sure that it¨s level
> of "ridiculous articles" is in no way  different from any other Wikipedia. A
> Danish newspaper recently made an informal comparison between the "official"
> encyclopedia "Den store danske" on the internet and the Danish Wikipedia,
> where Wikipedia came out on top.

While I realise, the specific chosen articles in that article did
relatively fine, the Danish Wikipedia is lagging in areas where it
could be a lot better.  Articles about Danish geography and famous
writers is severely lagging.

But just because there are a lot of stubs is not the real concern.  I
remember reading an article on Skagen on the dawiki, and the article
explicit said that in 5400 years, the sands around it would have
reached Sweden.  This is obviously a single example, but unfortunately
it is not extraordinary.

> I recommend anybody really concerned about the state of the Danish language
> and/or the state of the Danish Wikipedia to write and correct articles. It
> will pay off better than doing localization.
>
> Allow me to suggest that some explanation for the lag in article numbers and
> contributors is the fact that Danish summers are more sunny and winters less
> severe than is the case in our northern neighbourhood :-) .

>From a linguistic point of view, Danish is different in treatment
compared to Icelandic, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish.  The latter
four get a lot of localisation treatment themselves, such as having
foreign words and loanwords being corrected for their respective
lexicon.

Danish, however, simply takes the original loanword and only in rare
cases changes its writing.  The influence of English in Danish should
thus be obvious to anyone speaking the language.  As a result, it is
common for Danes at times simply to revert entirely to Danish, and as
a result, I believe that Danes are in a larger aspect contributing to
enwiki than dawiki.

Which is most unfortunate.