[Foundation-l] An agenda for the meeting of the language committee

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:55, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta at gmail.com> wrote:
> One thought occurred to me: there is no representation of Asian languages in
> the committee (and I don't mean only Indian languages). Would the committee
> want to consider an expansion in membership to include someone who is fluent
> in one or more Asian languages?

In principle yes, but... [1]

Linguistic qualifications for becoming a LangCom member are not so
simple. After a couple of years in LangCom, I may say that many
professors of linguistics don't fit. And the main reason is not their
knowledge, but attitude toward languages. Or, to be more precise,
their boldness. For example, LangCom tasks require from one
Indo-Europeanist to give expertize on any Indo-European language, but
many of them would say that the classification of, let's say, Kurdish
languages is not the part of their job, but the part of the job of an
expert in Iranian languages. Such expert in LangCom is basically
useless.

It is even worse if we are talking about, let's say, an expert in
solely Hindi or Tamil. We have Wikipedias in both languages and we
don't need further expertize for those languages. Besides that,
English is widely spoken lingua franca of South Asia and we can
communicate with interested parties. Unlike, let's say, the situation
in former USSR or Latin America, where many speakers of indigenous
languages primarily speak Russian or Spanish as their lingua franca.
So, if we need to cover some area with a fluent speaker of lingua
franca, our primary goal should be Spanish for now.

At the other side, a linguist with combined knowledge of a couple of
languages from different primary groups would be very helpful. For
example, a Hindi linguist who is expert in Austro-Asiatic languages
and who is familiar with SIL and Wikimedia. But, more than that, if it
is about person with good connections at some larger Indian or Chinese
university (or, at least, a not so shy student of linguistics) and who
is familiar with SIL and Wikimedia -- it would be quite good.

We've already started to get requests for projects in not well known
languages. For example, this one [2][3] is very well described, thanks
to the fact that university exists there [4]. So, at this point of
time, for the primary job of LangCom, we need at least partially
extraordinary linguists. And, again, not by expertise, but by
attitude. Ideally, someone like Joseph Greenberg [5].

However, this was about present tasks of LangCom and we are not going
to Berlin to talk [just] about them. We could talk about those issues
via mailing list.

Except having fun while thinking is there any reachable expert for
some language and being happy to see new project alive, LangCom tasks
are quite boring. The most of the requests are about new Wikimedia
projects in a language which already has at least one project (usually
Wikipedia). And, because of the numbers, at some point, number of
Wikimedia languages will reach a stable number. It is not likely that
we will have projects in languages with ~100 speakers or even ~1000.
If such language has writing system -- which is not likely --, and if
there are literate people with such language as native -- which is not
likely -- they have much more important tasks to do than to write an
encyclopedia: to gather linguistic and ethnological heritage of a
culture which probably won't exist in 50 years.

But, there are sets of tasks which Wikimedia is able to do and which
LangCom should initiate. And for those sets of tasks we'll need more
people all over the world, no matter what is their linguistic
knowledge. Some of them are:

1) Active approach in creation of Wikimedia projects for languages
with writing system and more than ~100.000 of speakers. Those
languages are very living, but it is usually a matter of Internet
access and living conditions why they don't have Wikipedia yet. BTW,
there are a couple of 1M+ languages without Wikipedia, too. This is
the task where anyone in particular geographical area could be very
useful.

2) Missing computer tools. The most of deaf people literate in their
native (sign) languages are not able to have Wikipedia. 60% of Mongols
are not able, too. That's just because only Internet Explorer supports
top to bottom writing. Many languages have significant problems with
writing it by computer. It varies from having minor but frustrating
difficulties (any right to left writing system while trying to write,
let's say, URL), up to missing symbols in Unicode.

3) Missing basic tools. Many languages don't have writing systems. It
is about the majority of world's languages, actually. And some of
those languages could survive with proper care.

So, this meeting will be used to think about changing the course of
LangCom: from passive decision-making body, to active working body.
And we need your input of that kind. And yes, we are fully aware of
our Euro-centric membership. And while there is no need to have 100
members of a decision-making body which would have just less and less
job, there is a need for a number of members and contributors if we
are going to widen our scope.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Yerevan ;)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alekano_language
[3] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=gah
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Goroka
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Greenberg