[Wikipedia-l] Re: FW: Wikipedia for Old English

[Pablo Saratxaga]

Kaixo!

On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 01:19:44PM -0400, James R. Johnson wrote:
>       OE is still active as a language, with new works being written even
> now, and translation projects going for the Bible, Shakespeare, and other
> works of literature.

But consider that wikipedia goal is not to be a compialtion of
litterary and translation works (wikibook, on the other hand, is),
but a medium to serve information on all (or at least a wide range)
of topics, in a given language.

Transposed to classroom analogy, wikipedia is not a class given
in English about Anglosaxon culture, but it is mathematics, physics,
biology etc classes teached in Anglosaxon language.

You should ask if your main goal would be to create content *in*
Anglosaxon, or *about* Anglosaxon (that can be in the same langue too
but that's not the point).
In other words, do you plan to have at some points articles about
computer science, biology, space travel, modern history, etc. written
in Anglosaxon, or is your plan to focus on litterary/linguistic topics
related with the langue? In the second case, maybe wikibook with
a small encyclopedia-like section for those topics would be a better
idea.

> James R. Johnson wrote:
> > May I ask why Klingon, and Esperanto have Wikis?

Esperanto is a living language that a lot of people use to communicate
and share knowledge on all sort of topics.

As far as I know Klingon and Anglosaxon are only used by a very small
community, and not for normal everyday communication, not to share
knowledge in all sort of topics, but rather to communicate and share
knowledge on some topics only, very related to the langue itself.

So, indeed, I think that, for exactly the same reasons as I exposed
above, Klingon should maybe have been on wikibook rather than
on wikipedia.

wikibook and wikipedia are, technically, exactly the same (it's exactly
the same software used); however, on wikipedia you can expect to have
some sort of symetry between the languages, on the long time tending
to a similar content (detailed data on a majority of topics), only
in different languages.
As I doubt that languages not used for normal everyday communication
nor normal knowledge transmission would ever get very developped
wikipedias, those will look "incomplete" in comparaison with others.

On the other hand, a wikibook site is more or less independent of other
wikibooks, its content doesn't reflect nor has to reflect nor is
expected to reflect the content of wikibooks in other languages;
and so can be shaped and target the content and topics best suited
to the culture vehiculated by the language.
 
> objection to your plan.  Unless there's some reason to think that it's a bad
> idea (Klingon, for example, was and is controversial), then if people want
> to do it, they should do it.  "I would enjoy working on it" is a perfectly
> valid reason.

But I think some people may request a wikipedia because they don't
know ther would be a possibility to have a similar functionality without
the burden of the requirement to build an encyclopedic general purpose
content.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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