Also, one major difference between Solresol/Frater and languages such as Catalan, Occitan, Alsatian (now transformed into the Alemannic wikipedia), Breton, etc which already have Wikipedias is this: Solresol and Frater are "constructed languages" with no native speakers. They are not "minority languages" like these other languages, they are in a different category completely. There are 0 people who can read or write Solresol or Frater better than any natural language.
This doesn't mean I wouldn't support a Solresol or Frater wikipedia; all I'm saying is that these languages are not comparable.
--node
On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 17:20:01 +0100, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Francois, please don't give up so easily. If you truly believe that this is something worth doing and encouraging, it should take more than a few people saying "maybe" rather than "yes" to make you give up. Nobody here has said "no" to your proposals; if you think you can make this work, then have courage and try to make it work, even when it seems difficult. I will try to address and discuss some of your current concerns below.
On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 16:22:46 +0200, oboenfan oboenfan@hotmail.com wrote:
As I did discover yesterday this background mailing list (I did all the time suppose that all the talk where open talks in the open-talk pages; I know, it was naive) I was chocked.
Yes, there has long been debate about whether we should use mailing-lists such as this. The main reason they still exist is that people find them more convenient for certain kinds of discussion than the wiki pages. They are not intended to be any less open.
The "no":
The open character of information ressources may be a potency but it is a danger at the same time because there is no indicator of quality. If you by something at ebay, you know that the partner is registered, you can look for his evaluations and you can even look what other user did criticize. You can open the other young article and look the texts concerning the problematical transaction. All that has no equivalent in Wiki.
Working out how we can ensure quality is one of the biggest issues facing Wikipedia today, but we know it, and we are constantly working to introduce mechanisms to help. You mentioning e-bay here is interesting, because they have had to try hard to solve a similar problem - how to measure trustworthiness of anonymous sellers over the Internet. Clearly, you feel that their current measures work well enough to trust - others might point out that it is still possible to fool people by making multiple small, genuine, sales to gain a reputation and then making a larger, fraudulent, sale.
There will probably *always* be a struggle to improve such systems, but that should not stop us trying to create projects which have the chance for real beneifts.
You consulte an information, perhaps an important information with consequences on your comportement because that and for the next development of your life, and there is no evaluation or possibility of any control. It would be possible to enter problematical information with the objective to influence. What to influence is a question of the specific detail.
I'm not sure what you were trying to say with the example you gave here. If you meant that it is possible for Wikipedia to contain incorrect information, then again I say: this is something we are trying to address; the official policy is that Wikipedia should have a "Neutral Point of View" - any article which deliberately sets out to influence is one that needs fixing, and we are trying to find ways of spotting and labelling such articles.
But your example almost suggests to me that the CIA's World Fact Book may be the one in error - or, at least, that there may be credible challenges to its figures. A *good* Wikipedia article would actually *help* here: with no agenda of its own, and no editorial control to suppress alternative viewpoints, any supportable statistics could be entered alongside each other, with a discussion of why each may be better or worse. This is an advantage of the wiki approach, not a disadvantage.
[...] And if this information would be correct why did you give in wiki the ok to start new wikis in those declining dialects and languages? Only to disturb the unity of countries like France or Spain etc? Or did you do that with the conviction to help people to develope somewhat, that is precious to protect, somewhat with a great valor? Today your restrictive conviction concerning solresol is for me an indicator more of the first as of the second: Soleresol was a great invention. But different people don't want to allow that other languages as national language can exist parallel to the national language.
I disagree with your conclusions here: the various language wikipedias were started by individuals or small groups of people who thought it would be a useful, achievable project resulting in a useful resource. I have seen nobody say that you should not be allowed to propose this project; only people who are not sure whether it is achievable, or whether it would be useful. So prove them wrong: convince them that it could be achievable, and would be useful, and set about making it happen.
A lot of idealists works in these pages, do her best to make a lot of Different editors of course reinvente only the wheel (and it seems you prefer those editors: A encyclopedie book oder CDROM costs only 10 Euro in Germany today)
I'm not sure why you consider us as "reinventing the wheel"; no, we are not the first to write an encyclopedia, but we are the first to write a collabourative, multi-lingual, freely available (not only for no money, but also with no restrictions on copying and distributing), un-biased encyclopedia. How is that encouraging people to reinvent the wheel?
For this reason I did in the supposition that Wiki did be a really open and wide seeing institution say to me: YES, I cooperate also.
Some decisions have to be considered carefully: if we allow too many versions of Wikipedia that turn out to be unsuccessful, we risk taking effort away from others that have better chances of success. On the other hand, if we create too few, we are failing in our aim of making information available to those who need it. So it is only natural that we want to pause and consider before saying "YES" to your proposal.
But I did ignore those back ground tribunals like this access limited email-list wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org
I still don't understand why you think of this list as "access-limited": you were able to post here, as is anybody else who wishes to. If you mean it is not well-enough publicised, that is a different matter: the discussions on this list are no more closed to the public than on our wikis.
and the opinion, that a persone can only get a chance if he already did have this chance on a different place, if he already has a successfull community (* Audience : who will read this new language, how many people does that represent, if few people, are they likely to be better served by another language * Editors : who will work on that new project, how many people ).
You have to be aware that creating an encyclopedia in a new language is a big challenge, and not something that will just happen as soon as you decide to start. This is what Anthere meant about needing an audience and editors - it doesn't matter if they don't exist yet, but it matters if they never will. If you start a project where you are the only contributor, it will be extremely hard work, and you will not have the power of collaboration which makes Wikipedia work. If you start on a project where only you want to read it, all your effort will be wasted, and better spent elsewhere.
So to make a project successful, you need to have reason to believe that your project will "gather steam": that there will soon be enough editors to make a real start, and that there are people out there who will find your work, use it, and with luck become contributors themselves. You don't need to already have a community, but you need to have the means to build a community. For a solresol encyclopedia, you need enough people who know solresol, or who are willing to learn it, that will be interested in reading it, and hopefully also in helping create it.
In short: if you think there are people who will want to use this, and want to help you with it, those are your editors and readers, even if they don't know it yet. If you believe that they are out there, then you have my blessing to start, and probably that of most others here.
Have courage.
Rowan Collins [IMSoP]
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l