[Wikipedia-l] Re: Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia

[Mark Williamson]

"You've repeatedly pointed out that you don't want to spend the time,
money, or effort to create and maintain wikis without any active
participants, yet you insist that the Wikimedia Foundation does so. You
haven't really made a case for why, except that these languages exist
and have speakers. I don't think anyone debates those points; I also
don't think that "a language exists" has "there should be a Wikimedia
wiki for it" as a necessary consequent."

How much money does it cost to create a new Wiki? Technical efforts
aside (and Tim Starling seems entirely willing to give technical
assistance to Wikipedias for living natural languages), there is very
little wrong.

You are exaggerating this very much, and perhaps you should also check
http://bloglines.com/public/inactivewikipedias . Your allegations that
I don't want to spend the time on these things are pure crap because I
already spend time on them - for the last few days I have closely been
monitoring the activity on every single one of these Wikipedias, and I
don't mind it one bit.

If somebody does something bad, I can revert it; if it becomes a
problem I can't handle, I can bring it up with a developer or steward
or whomever it would be appropriate to bring it up with.

As to being upset that nobody cares about your language, from what I
have learned the usual reaction is quite the opposite - in the time I
have been monitoring inactive Wikipedias, I have seen ne.wikipedia
become active, in a good way, and although I am not sure it is
permanent, I think it's good. Also, take for example ka.wikipedia. The
sysops there now, Malafaya and Sopho, found it through a search engine
and when they saw it had 0 content, they decided to remedy that.

And what on earth are you talking about, a "scholarly resource"? When
did I argue that inactive Wikipedias were scholarly resources? The
only time I ever brought up anything of the sort was in regards to the
Gothic Wikipedia (it looks dismal now, but I have after-holidays
commitments from a few people), in which case I did not say "Oh golly
gee, I know this Wikipedia will have two articles and 0 users, but
somehow I think it'd be a scholarly resource anyways", what I said was
basically that, if it accumulated a large number of articles, it would
be a scholarly resource of sorts because it would be such a large
corpus. Note the "large corpus" and "large number of articles".

I think that your views are extremely Draconian and such extreme
measures are not needed at this point, the benifits are not outweighed
by the risks with the current solution.

I think that - and I am serious here - you have a real problem with
minority languages.

Mark

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:26:20 -0500, Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-24-11 at 08:51 -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
> 
> > I agree, however apparently there is some reason (which I do not yet
> > fully comprehend) that we must be very careful with Wikipedias in
> > different languages.
> 
> I think the big thing to understand is that each wiki takes time,
> effort, and money to maintain. Each wiki is a security risk, both
> technically and legally; an active community can offset this risk as
> well or better than fancy technological security measures.
> 
> An analogy: leaving the door to your house unlocked when you're having a
> backyard barbecue is the right thing to do. There's lots of people
> around, and they'll need to get in and out, and there's little risk of
> problems. It'd be really inconvenient to have to keep locking and
> unlocking it. Leaving the door unlocked when you are the only one home
> is probably OK. Leaving your door unlocked when no one is home is asking
> for trouble.*
> 
> A wiki without an active user community is an unlocked house with no one
> home.
> 
> You've repeatedly pointed out that you don't want to spend the time,
> money, or effort to create and maintain wikis without any active
> participants, yet you insist that the Wikimedia Foundation does so. You
> haven't really made a case for why, except that these languages exist
> and have speakers. I don't think anyone debates those points; I also
> don't think that "a language exists" has "there should be a Wikimedia
> wiki for it" as a necessary consequent.
> 
> Even if the disadvantages are low, the advantages of having empty,
> unused wikis don't seem to outweigh them. I find it hard to believe
> that, say, gv: is a huge source of pride for Manx speakers. If that was
> my native language, I'd think to myself, "Man, nobody really gives two
> shakes about us, do they?" And the idea that any unused Wikimedia wiki
> is a scholarly resource for the language is absurd. I guess there's a
> intellectual exercise in reading the list of ISO 639 codes, seeing which
> ones don't already have a Wikipedia, looking up the language, and then
> making a request on this list, but... I don't think that gratification
> is enough to offset the disadvantages.
> 
> > So apparently every single language or dialect has to go before the
> > board and waste their time...
> 
> I'd say that having a clear set of rules about how and when to start a
> Wikimedia wiki would obviate the need for a Board vote on each one.
> Like, I dunno, say: having a single person step forward willing to work
> on the wiki in the language, and maybe having one edit per 30 or 60
> days. That seems like a pretty low threshold to me.
> 
> ~ESP
> 
> * In some cities and countries. In other places, it's perfectly OK to
> leave your door unlocked when you're not home.
> 
> --
> Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
> 
> 
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