[Wikipedia-l] Re: Brazilian Portuguese

[Tim Starling]

Felipe Sanches wrote:
> Wikipedia new language request.
> There are 182.1 million people in Brazil who use Brazilian Portuguese
> as their main language.
> Brazilian Portuguese IS NOT the same as Portuguese (domain
> pt.wikipedia.org) and it still isn't on the list
> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_language_wikis_available)

I'm worried that this might be just another aspect of the old 
nationalistic dispute that's been raging on pt for many months. We've 
had a Brazilian admin continually recreating a deleted article, and 
eventually getting frustrated and abusing his admin powers. He was 
de-sysopped by me. And the Portuguese admins report being constantly 
attacked for trying to uphold site-wide policy.

One of the Portuguese admins told me that the cause of the dispute is a 
Brazilian culture of copyright infringment. A Brazilian contributor 
would copy and paste from another website, and a Portuguese admin would 
delete it. Some of the Brazilian contributors apparently framed this as 
a nationalistic dispute, as if Portugal was trying to exert control over 
its former colony.

If we did have a Brazilian Portuguese wiki, it should be made very clear 
to them that all content must be public domain or legally licensed under 
  GFDL. I imagine the wider Wikipedia community will have to regularly 
audit them for compliance.

-- Tim Starling