El 21/04/2014 02:15 a.m., Asaf Bartov escribió:
- An example: some time ago, our colleagues in Chile wanted to spend (not
a lot of) movement funds on printing the "Welcome to Wikipedia" booklet in Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui is (perhaps) spoken by fewer than 3000 people, no doubt mostly without facility with or regular access to the Internet. There is not, and there never will be, a Wikipedia that is a useful reference source in Rapa Nui. And that's okay, because there is also not, and never will be, a person on this planet who _needs_ free knowledge in Rapa Nui, that is, who cannot consume knowledge in another language (indeed, I dare wager fully 100% of Rapa Nui speakers not only _can_ consume knowledge in Spanish, but would _prefer_ to do so. In practical terms, I mean, e.g. if they needed medical information and had a page of Rapa Nui and a page of Spanish providing that information before them).
Speakers of minority languages, and especially, aboriginal languages, have for hundreds of years been used or forced to rely on a dominant/colonial language (in this particular case, Spanish) to access information unrelated to their own culture -medicine, science, technology, world history-. That does not exactly mean they _prefer_ to use it.
- What does interest me, as a grantmaker, is where to draw the line
between the Rapa Nui end of the spectrum and languages that, with some active promotion, could well become useful and much-needed reference sources in some cultures. In other words, *what are the prerequisites for a viable Wikipedia in a given language?* At least good odds for one. Instinctively, I think those prerequisites would be some combination of:
- number of literate speakers with Internet access (audience)
- number of literate speakers with Internet access, education, and spare
time (prospective editors)
- availability of secondary sources in that language
- availability of news sources in that language
- reasonable way to type the language into a computer
Of these, only the last one is something we can do something about (and indeed have been doing).
I would welcome some thinking from all interested, including the Language Committee, on what might a reasonable set of criteria be for a language we would consider it reasonable to promote a _Wikipedia_ in.
In this part, I agree more with you and still think that a Wiktionary and a Wikisource would help more the speakers of a particular language to enter the wiki-world, with a fully functional Wikipedia being the next stage; I still remember there was a Wikipedia, the Afar Wikipedia, with ONE article. That did not make any sense to me.
M.