[Wikipedia-l] Brazilian Portuguese

[leercontainer-wikimedia at yahoo.com]

>Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 13:40:32 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
<snip>
>
>--- Felipe Sanches <felipe.sanches at gmail.com> 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

In Norway there are two official forms of written norwegian (bokmål
~90% and nynorsk ~10%) that I suppose differ more than br_pt and pt_pt
judging from the comments here on the list. In addition there is one
(perhaps two) "unofficial" conservative form also in use(riksmål),
especially by one of the first and most active contributors (Wolfram).
We have had some long and "disruptive" discussions and and I suspect
that new contributors /might/ have been turned off by the dominant form
bokmål being used on the interface and on almost all articles.

Recently a new contributor has been wary of the dominance of bokmål and
wanted to start a new nynorsk wikipedia, which has also been done, just
like that!
http://nn.wikipedia.org

the discussions that ensued before and after have resulted in me making
this (roughly translated) policy, which nobody has disagreed with yet
(the most active users in the discussion have agreed):

1 Articles on the norwegian Wikipedia can be written in any currently
active form of norwegian.
2 Since Wikipedia is a [[wiki]], anyone ''can'' change the language
form of an article, it should then be up to this user to:
2.1 Change the language form of the whole article in one operation.
2.2 Move the article to a new name if needed.
2.3 Not do this to provoke or harm the work of others.
2.4 Communicate the content as good or better than before.

It is quite finished yet, I found some errors now, but I think this
will  prevent the balkanization of the Norwegian Wikipedia.

--Dittaeva