[Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia

[Mark Williamson]

> Having said all that, here's my main point. I value your enthusiasm and I am in favour any appropriate means for preserving and promoting endangered minority languages (which are a precious cultural heritage) such as Saterlandic Frisian. However, I think it's just impossible to create a useful online encyclopedia depending on volunteer editors out of a community of barely 2000 native speakers. Please think about it. From looking at your name, I guess you are not a native speaker, are you? Please don't get me wrong. Of course, you can set up a Saterlandic wikipedia technically. But once it is installed would it ever have the slightest chance of becoming a useful, reliable source of information? Could it ever really flourish? If so, great! But given the small number of Saterlandic speakers I really doubt that. And please remember that even for those, say, 1.800 people the language they read and write in is German.

I for one think that a smaller community (even a "microcommunity"
perhaps) is more conducive to the Wiki concept because unlike such
large communities as Dutch or German speakers, it is very conceivable
that /every single speaker/ of Saterlandic Frisian could become
involved in such a Wikipedia.

I once had an idea, that we could set up a Hopi Wikipedia, and then
work on promotion of it on Hopi, get elders and teenagers involved,
try to get middle-aged people involved as well, and eventually hope
for 90% community involvement of Hopi speakers. When such a point is
reached, it is a virtual mirror of the real-life community, except it
is also working towards building an encyclopaedia.

Unfortunately I don't have the time or the resources to begin such a
project, and generally Hopi people are very distrusting of white
people in such matters (and with good reason, too) and although a
medium level of involvement may be reached, it might be hard to get
elders involved in what they see as a possible attempt by whites to
poison or kill Hopi language and culture.

However, in the future I will consider this idea, but I think there
are more ideal communities, for example the community of Havasupai
speakers living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon - there are less of
them, only a few hundred, but unlike Hopi, the entire community speaks
the language. (there are at least 3 monolinguals, although there are
more for Hopi) With the already developing advanced infrastructure of
the community, it is much more conceivable that total community
involvement in a Havasupai-language Wikipedia could be reached,
including everybody from the elders to the schoolchildren, all of whom
speak the language and are isolated by their location (at the bottom
of the Grand Canyon).

> How many editors does a wikipedia need to work (even if only at a very modest level)? E. g. the Dutch wikipedia (with c. 55,000 articles) currently has 9,333 registered editors, out of a language community of maybe 23 million. That equals a ratio of 0.04 % editors - and even if that number might still grow in the future, most wikipedia languages probably won't even reach that percentage. Now try to break that down for Saterlandic! In my opinion the only way for a wikipedia to become a success is to bring together a large number of people to cooperate. As far as Saterlandic is concerned, that is just not possible. That is a pity, of course. But it's the truth.

Why is it not possible? When you have such a small speaker community,
promotion is easier - you could even go door-to-door!

Even at the worst case, I think that 30% community involvement is
there, given promotion effort.

> If you think I am too pessimistic please have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_ranking_February_2005, ranks 86 through 161. It's not that those wikipedias have just been established recently. Matter of fact, most of them have existed for quite some time now. Some of them have been around for a couple of years or more. And all of them have been them have been set up with the best of intentions by committed people just like you. And many of those languages have millions of speakers. But nevertheless, those wikipedias just aren't running. I always get kind of sad when I look at them. I surely wouldn't like to see a Saterlandic edition ending up like that.

Most of these Wikipedias were requested by people who had the notion
"I have heard of this language. There is no Wikipedia in it. It should
be created." but were never followed up after their creation.

In addition, even these ill-requested Wikipedias are picking up speed,
one-by-one... look at the flurry of activity on ka:, li:, hy:, etc.
which had previously been inactive for months (li: actually had 0
pages)! ka: and hy:, two important languages of the Caucasus region
(Georgian and Armenian), now have over 100 articles and are quickly
growing more! Unfortunately it seems that such success is limited
almost exclusively to European languages and more recently Indic
languages to a certain degree, although African languages (examples
are Bambara bm:, Wolof wo:, Amharic am:, Lingala ln:) have seen some
unexpected activity recently.

However, it seems to me that Wouter has some connection to this
language (given his intimate knowledge of the specific differences
from West Frisian), and given that he has said he started a test
Wikipedia on Meta, I don't think this is idle talk from a non-speaker.

Mark