Is the only reason you edit Wikipedia so that in the future you will be able to claim to have contributed to those articles, or do you do it because you love Wikipedia?
The explanation for my requests for new Wikipedias is simple: 1. I love languages and am a strong supporter of linguistic diversity, and 2. I love Wikipedia, especially because of its fairly lax policies regarding sites in other languages.
As of yet I have not claimed to being the "founder" of scn:, and I never plan on doing so. Sure, I requested its creation, but the real founder is Giuseppe d'Angelo because he did all the work (adding new content, translating the interface, etc etc)
Even for nv:, a Wikipedia that I have so far done all of the work on (actually including the logo), I do not and will not go around saying that I was the founder, because to me this is about building Wikipedias in languages that don't have them, not about fame and glory.
As you can see if you go to any one of a number of different small Wikipedias that already exist, or if you could read my email outbox, you would see that many of my contributions are virtually invisible to such a degree that even if I wanted to, I couldn't reasonably lay claim to having founded those Wikipedias. For example, on the Tibetan Wikipedia (bo), I added a few articles about plants and animals with very small amounts of text (small enough that I could be sure the Tibetan I used was correct) and with interwiki links to en:. On the Romansh Wikipedia (rm), I translated the topics on the mainpage as best I could to Romansh. On the Haitian Creole Wikipedia (ht), I changed the mainpage from just saying that it was there for someone to expand, to having a welcome and a list of topics (similar to the one on fr:) in Haitian Creole; I also did this for the Hawai'ian Wikipedia (haw).
I have also made similar minor contributions to many other Wikipedias, for example the Yiddish Wikipedia (yi) where there are 19 articles, I changed the mainpage from a simple welcome and description of Wikipedia to something similar to what ht: and haw: have, with the exception that the welcome text itself is in Yiddish (I have spent any time I'm not on the computer in the last few days scouring a Yiddish dictionary for words from the topic index, such as "Christianity", which is fairly difficult because it's a one-way dictionary so I have to 1. guess the first sound of the Yiddish word 2. use my poor knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet to find the appropriate place which is usually the most time-consuming part, and 3. sometimes search up and down individual pages over and over again until I actually notice the word, if it's there).
However none of the contributions I have just given as examples were really very big in comparison to the contributions I hope will come from others in the future.
Let it also be known that I am not just sitting here after I do that saying "OK, now all I have to do is sit back and wait for somebody to come", instead I take a more active approach and search for people who might be interested and send them e-mails. I have also reached out a little through people I actually know to try to get contributors.
However as I said before, by the time these Wikipedias have even 100 articles, my contribution will be nothing.
The only reason I do any of this for these Wikipedias is that I want to watch them grow, and I want people to have fun working on them, and I want the people who speak that language to have a Wikipedia in that language, and I don't want that language to die in the digital age because of low presence on the web (in some cases).
If I wanted to do it for other reasons, I think it's more probable that I would've requested adminship at all these Wikipedias. So far, I am only an admin at nv: which is a language I can claim to speak at least decently enough to write some good content in and translate the interface, but I plan to ask to be desysopped when the Wikipedia takes off. Other people who have worse intentions have requested adminship at Wikipedias they make only minor contributions to near the beginning and they don't speak the language at all, and even other people who don't have worse intentions have done so.
For me, seeing a new Wikipedia sprout and begin to grow feels like it feels when you get a letter you have been waiting for and are excited to recieve, except it never stops after that Wikipedia starts growing.
These are the reasons I am so upset about these proposed changes in policy I feel would limit the ability of Wikipedia-seeds to be sown and to sprout and to grow. Even if I am not the one who starts every single Wikipedia from here on out (which I certainly hope not to be, for I hope others continue to request new Wikipedias), I am concerned that one person who is very excited and determined to start a Wikipedia and is the kind of person who ends up writing 200 articles for the new Wikipedia in a month or two and 1000 by year's end, will not be able to start a Wikipedia unless they find four other people who speak the language that will commit to working on it and they will presumably have to get the other four people to commit to it on this ML or on meta or something instead of just by asking them and getting verbal commitments.
I would add to that that WikiTravel currently has 5 different languages using their policy, 4 of them from rich first-world Western European countries, and the fifth from an Eastern European country which is quickly advancing economically (Romania and Moldova), whereas Wikipedia currently has Wikipedias with more than 10000 articles in languages from Europe and Asia, 1000 articles in languages from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and 100 articles in languages from Europe, Asia (including the highly-populated South Asia), Africa, and hopefully in the near future North America (when nv: or nah: reaches 100 articles). This ranges from languages with very few or no native speakers, to languages with over 1 billion speakers. Most notably, WikiTravel does not have Chinese.
As far as comparisons to Wikipedia, WikiTravel does not have Japanese (though there is a Japanese "expedition", it was created only last month and so far AFAIK none of the volunteers are native speakers, on top of that there are only 2 volunteers), which is the 3rd largest Wikipedia in terms of the number of "legitimate" articles.
I am afraid that that will happen to us, and unlike most of us here, that is my main concern on Wikipedia. Many of you may worry mostly about the foundation, or about an individual Wikipedia, or a couple or a few Wikipedias, with only a bit of concern for the other languages, but this is something I care deeply about.
The same way that an ant colony has different ants assigned to different jobs, I see myself as one of only a few "language ants" (as opposed to "ants of all trades") whose 1RY concern is the multilingual nature of Wikipedia, especially new Wikipedias.
As you might imagine, a "language ant" would be much more worried if the colony is about to make a major change in the handling of policy regarding languages that might restrict the free growth of new languages than would an "en.rc-patrol ant" or an "ant of all trades".
mark
On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 00:01:57 +0100, Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
On 3 Nov 2004, at 23:48, Mark Williamson wrote:
Hi all
I had gathered that people were getting fed up with requests from me for new Wikipedias, and now somebody has said it to my face.
It's really a bit weird from where I am though because I have requested only two new Wikipedias, the first one having been created and now growing steadily, and the second one (Friulian) with popular support from speakers of the language that is surer than it was for Sicilian (people committed for Sicilian, but they weren't Wikipedians already).
Now, in this message I don't want to ask your opinion about policy or about whether or not a certain Wikipedia should be created, I just want to know this: Are you fed up with the requests from me for new Wikipedias? Why?
Yes, I am "fed up" (as you say). I put it to you that you have no reason to push for new Wikipedias other than hoping that in the future you'll be able to claim being the "founder" of said Wikipedias.
I realise I may not be a fluent speaker of either of the languages I requested, but the way people are talking (somebody referred to me "flooding" this list with requests) makes it sound like I am selecting languages at random from a list and requesting them at a rate of 10 per week or something, when in fact I had already asked fluent speakers if they would be interested, got a commitment, and so far have only requested two Wikipedias (a few months ago, I asked Brion to create sc: on IRC [but not this list!], and I recognise now that was probably a mistake)
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