[Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request

[Pablo Saratxaga]

Kaixo!

On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 04:02:50AM +0000, Arwel Parry wrote:

> Oh, please no. We had an enormous argument about Klingon and even now 
> there's only 50 articles on tlh.

And Klingon is a full language, actually used by some fans;
Quenya is fragmentary.
 
> Is there really a user community large enough to sustain a Quenya 
> wikipedia? What would the language code be? And can MediaWiki handle 
> Tengwar fonts?

Mediawiki supports unicode, and there is a provisional encoding of
tengwar on plane 17 (I think); and it works nicely.

But the technical problems shouldn't be a criterium for deciding
for or against a given wikipedia.

I'm against a Quenya wikipedia, for the same reason I was against
a Klingon one (and facts proved me right on that one): a Wikipedia
is an encyclopedia, that is, a medium to communicate human knowledge.

So, the key to decide, is if a given language is used (or if there are
good indices that its speakers want to use it) to communicate knowledge.

It isn't enough (and imho, it is completly irrelevant) that there 
is litterature in that language (that would be for wikibooks;
and I'm actually favorable for a Klingon or Quenya wikibooks; as
there actually are poetry and litterary texts written in those
languages), the key point is the will to *communicate* in that
language, and to *teach* in that language (just communicate for fun
is not enough either; as the case of Klingon proved; despite the
fact that there are people able to speak in Klingon, and that do
speak in Klingon each other; there is apparently nobody willing to
use Klingon to teach about general knowledge.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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