[Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia

Sun Mar 6 21:52:50 UTC 2005

That's encouraging and interesting Mark. Indeed I am convinced good 
communication is more important than the creative process itself.

You mention the Limburgish wikipedia. Did you know that its recent expansion 
is largely my work? I speak Limburgish, though I do so with an accent, I can 
write it and I know some of its speakers. The creator of the Limburgish 
Wikipedia does speak Limburgic, but realised that he could speak it far 
better than he could write it, so he was reluctant to write all to much. 
Anyway, I began to work and in my slipstreams a few other joined; thus we 
expanded the Limburgish wiki from 9 to the present 309 articles.

In this case, there are enough speakers, enough competent writers, but 
virtually no-one knew of the project. Currently we are doing more PR, and 
hope to attract more attention. In my opinion, I should learn from this and 
start my PR in Time...

Wouter

>From: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>,wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia
>Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 14:23:26 -0700
>
> > 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
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

_________________________________________________________________
Spreek vrienden en familie met MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.nl/