[Foundation-l] Fwd: Re: Projects in simple languages

[Milos Rancic]

This was intended to be reply to the list.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Projects in simple languages
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:12:16 +0100
From: Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>
To: Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

On 06/20/2011 08:55 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> I have been around the Wikimedia projects since 2004. This is the very first time I have ever heard any official subset of English mentioned in any connection with the Simple English Wikipedia. Did I just miss past documentation to this effect? Was this part of its founding? When was Basic English first linked with Simple?

Evidently from the beginning.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia

Simple English Wikipedia is a Wikipedia encyclopedia, written in basic
English.[1]

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

Even in the earliest revision of the main page
http://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=461 it
refers to controlled vocabulary of 1000-2000 words.

Ogden's Basic English was published in 1940. It's unlikely that those
who asked for simple.wikipedia.org were unaware of it.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/