[Wikimediaau-l] adopting a language project

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 12:10 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was looking at Wikimedia Indonesia earlier this evening...and
> thought it would be nice to have a list of language projects that fall
> under our care by default.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Indonesia/Activities
>
> Sadly, LangCom assures me that strine will never be given an ISO code,
> irrespective of how many words and phrases we make up.
>
> We talked a while ago about Aboriginal languages; perhaps we can
> continue along that path by trying to determine which Australian
> Aboriginal languages are already represented by native speaking
> Wikipedians  (do we have userboxen for that?)
>
> However while we work up support for Aboriginal languages, perhaps we
> can hone our skills in this area by adopting a language project of a
> nearby country, or a language which has a large number of visitors,
> immigrants or refugees.  Individually most of us would be unlikely to
> get involved in these projects, as the learning curve is steep, but
> perhaps by working as a team, a small group with general interest in
> languages can learn a language together, falling back heavily on
> English communication channels, like a dedicated mailing list or a
> Wikiversity learning project, so as to not overburden the native
> speakers on "their" wiki.
>
> Here is a list of projects in the incubator:
>
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
>
> The most obvious candidate that I can see in there is the Balinese
> Wikipedia, which currently has 8 articles, for the 3.9 million native
> speakers.
>
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/ban
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balinese_language
>
> Two others that look relevant are:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%B6koot_language - Kenya
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari_language - Afghanistan

Another suitable project is the Tetum language project, one of the two
official languages of East Timor, with 800,000 native speakers (ATW :-
according to Wikipedia).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetum_language

They currently have 339 good pages of a total 1,102 pages, 3 admins (2
are inactive) and 586 users. (I am user 587 !  ;-) )

Tetum has an empty wiktionary to accompany it:

http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wt/tet

Cheers,
John Vandenberg