[Wikipedia-l] Request for new Wikipedia: Friulian

[Mark Williamson]

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 07:37:19 +0100, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:20:37 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'd like to request a new Wikipedia for the Friulian language.
> 
> I don't feel that one person who admits to being rarely online is
> enough to justify the creation of a new language Wikipedia.

If you read it, you'll see that this person claims to have another
Friulian person interested in working on it.
 
> > This would be my third request for an Italian minority language
> > Wikipedia... having requested only a few Wikis, I find it quite
> > strange that three of them should be Italian minority languages (1.
> > Sardinian sc:, 2. Sicilian scn:, 3. Friulian)
> 
> Sardinian and Sicilian have only 28 articles between them. The lack of
> success of these so far should be taken into account when deciding
> whether another minority language should be started without a more
> significant number of supporters willing to edit that Wikipedia.

Sardinian is admittedly a dud. Sicilian is still growing steadily, and
I'm sure they'd not appreciate the not-so-nice things you seem to
think of them.
 
> I propose we adopt Wikitravel's policy of requiring at least five
> potential contributors before starting a new language. See
> http://www.wikitravel.org/en/article/Wikitravel:Language_version_policy

Hmm, how many of the Wikipedias with currently over 100 articles
started out with more than 5 contributors? From personal experience
alone, I can guarantee you that lb: (with currently over 1000
articles) and kw: (with currently over 200 articles) did not, and I'm
sure many or even most other Wikipedias are in the same situation.

Also, my definition of "potential contributors" means all the people
who speak the language and have Internet access, which in the case of
Friulian is well over 5.

And take a look, you'll notice Wikitravel only has 5 languages. Gee, I
wonder if this might have anything remotely to do with their policy?

If we require 5 people to commit to working on a new Wikipedia... why
not restrict individual article creation on en: by the same criterium?
That way, the number of mistakes in Wikipedia will be cut very
drastically. But, oh wait, what's that? Yes, inevitability?

At the beginning of this year, according to the sentiments of many,
the Kannada Wikipedia should have been deleted.

It is now growing steadily and much of the user interface is in
Kannada. And still, although there are more than 5 users, only around
3 of them are actually active.

And how many people speak Kannada? Is it a language with only a couple
hundred thousand speakers, like some of our active Wikipedias with
over 100 (or even 1000) articles? No... not really... Well, what about
under 1 million? No, not really. Under 10 million? Not really.

You see, Kannada is the mother tongue of heaps and heaps of people in
the Indian state of Karnataka (kannadaka). It is a Dravidian language.

How many of the Wikipedias we have today would exist now in their
present state had they not already existed when content was first
added?

Just as if we required people on en: to request a new article we would
have much fewer articles, it takes more time and effort and may be
confusing to some to figure out how to request a new language.

And how are they to know if there are already two people who would be
interested in the creation of such a Wikipedia?

If you are interested in multilingualism, internationalism, and
ultimately the building of an NPOV encyclopaedic resource in *any*
language, it makes no sense to advocate such restrictions.

For languages that are nobody's first language, such sentiment is
understandable to me.

But if we pursue such a policy, I do believe a fork with more liberal
policies regarding multilingualism is in order, not in the interest of
dividing Wikipedia but rather for the simple reason that by doing
this, we would be denying these people something that I do not
personally believe we should deny them. If we deny such an opportunity
to them, then I can no longer in good faith claim to support this
organisation fully and will consider creating a new site and a new
foundation with similar principles but with a stronger interest in
having policies more greatly favouring multilingualism than what you
have proposed.

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mw