[Wikipedia-l] Starting a new wiki

[Andre Engels]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 23:38:56 -0400 "James R. Johnson" <modean52 at comcast.net> 
wrote:
>I thought it would be created also...there was quite a bit of support when 
>I
>originally proposed the idea, and then everyone started talking about
>Chinese and Gothic.  The only reason I heard against it is that someone
>didn't feel like it.  But, what about all the wikis with less than 10
>articles?  Looks like they don't feel like it either.
>
>I looked, and the Afar, Armenian, Assamese, Aymara, Bashkir, Bengali,
>Bhojpuri, Bislama, Burmese, Dzongkha, Fijian, Georgian, Greenlandic,
>Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgiz, Lao, Lojban, Quechua,
>Manx, Nepali, Oriya, Oromo, Panjabi, Pashtu, Rumansh, Sardinian, Setswana,
>Somali, Sindhi, Sotho, Tajik, Telugu, Tibetan, Tongan, Tsonga, Turkmen, 
>Twi,
>Uighur, and Xhosa have 10 or fewer articles.  Are those who thought little
>of Gothic or Anglo-Saxon going to look again at those wikis?
>
>Just a thought.

No, I don't see these cases as similar at all. All these languages, perhaps 
with a few exceptions, are for some people their preferred language of 
communication. Thus, there is a *potential* for a blooming Wikipedia in 
those; it happens to be the case that we haven't attracted any Wikipedians 
working on them yet, but chances are high that at some point there will be 
people interested in reading and writing them.

On the other hand, for Anglo-Saxon or Gothic, there are people who are able 
to read and write it, but I have not been convinced yet that there are 
people who prefer to read their encyclopedia in those languages, nor that 
people would write them in an attempt to spread information rather than for 
novelty value.

Andre Engels