[Wikipedia-l] Re: Baseldytsch Wikipedia: Who can put it online?

[Mark Williamson]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 12:02:10 +0100, Andreas Brändle <andreas at obacht.ch> wrote:
> As I see you have already decided to set up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia,
> since you are looking for a language code. Didn't you wonder why there
> isn't a language code?
> 
> I want to make you aware of the consequences of setting up a
> Baseldytsch Wikipedia:
> 
> *Every single dialect group in Switzerland will have an own WP. There
> are around 100 local dialects (Baseldytsch is one of the bigger ones).
> *There are also regional and local dialects in Germany and Austria who
> might want to have their own WP
> 
> Am 18.11.2004 um 12:55 schrieb David Rossel:
> > Please, don't think about one wikipedia for all swiss-german dialects.
> > That
> > would be the same thing like the Alemannic wikipedia: An uncommon
> > mixture of
> > native dialects.
> In this point I agree with you.
> 
> But basically you want to set up a Wikipedia for one city with some
> 160'000 inhabitants and 600'000 inhabitants in the surroundings (where
> they already speak a slightly different dialect). That is comparable
> with an American suburb; let's call it Springfield. Imagine they want
> to have an own Wikipedia, because they're feeling so different,
> although they're all reading and writing in english.
> 
> A Baseldytsch Wikipedia would have much sense as a repository for words
> that only exist in Baseldytsch and not in German. But for that purpose
> it might be better to find a way to implement dialect and regional
> language culture into to the big German one.
> 
> German is a standardized language that everyone between the Matterhorn
> (southern part of Switzerland) and Hamburg (northern Germany)
> understands, reads and writes. In fact Swiss (also the people in Basel)
> read better German than their local dialect, because they're not used
> to the written form of the dialect. That makes German the best language
> for sharing knowledge within this geographic area. And sharing
> knowledge is actually the purpose of Wikipedia.
> 
> I am not against wiki-encyclopedias in Swiss German dialects. I am very
> proud of my native dialect and I wanna preserve it as well. But in my
> opinion this doesn't support the much more important purpose of
> Wikikpedia to make free knowledge accessible to everyone. If everyone
> sets up its own wiki, wiki-culture doesn't work anymore.
> 
> Cheers
> Andreas
> 
> 
> 
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Ainu, an isolated indigenous language of Japan with perhaps around 200
native-fluent speakers, has no ISO code, even though it is definitely
not a dialect of any other language by anybody's measurement. The
O'odham language has almost 50000 speakers, and is by no measure a
dialect of another language, but has no ISO code. (allow me to correct
myself, these have collective ISO codes but not individual codes)
Having no ISO code does not mean a language is not a language, or that
it is negligible.

As far as bsd not being an ISO code... it would of course take more
time, but one option would be for our proposers here to take it to the
committee which oversees the standard and request that their language
be added to the standard.

That aside, I think the best domain would probably be
http://baseldytsch.wikipedia.org/

Speaking of which, now that a speaker of Friulian has actually turned
up on the ML and is already a Wikipedian and has been for some time,
and there are no linguistic issues with Friulian, can somebody create
http://fur.wikipedia.org/ ? The language name is "Furlan".

If you actually care, there are already websites in Friulian, for
example http://www.friul.net/ http://www.lenghe.net/
http://www.partitrepublichefurlane.org/
http://www.siencis-par-furlan.net/ http://www.glesiefurlane.it/
http://www.sacilotto.net/index_fur.htm http://www.scritorsfurlans.org/
http://www.lacomugne.it/ http://www.istitutladinfurlan.it/
http://www.ladinsdalfriul.org/
http://www.lingue.regione.fvg.it/minor/fu/homepage.aspx etc etc etc...

Mark