[Wikipedia-l] Creating premium encyclopedias and/or promoting and preserving languages

[Boris Lohnzweiger]

Building an online encyclopedia at least as good as the Encyclopaedia Britannia is a very respectable aim I can fully identify with. Promoting and preserving minority (or less widespread) languages is another one that I endorse just as much. In many cases they might complement each other very well. If that is the case we'll have Wikipedias with "added value".

However, my conviction is that the these two separate goals do not necessarily always go hand in hand. Cases in which a language has too few speakers or is used as a language of first choice too infrequently to bring about an encyclopedia "Britannica or better" certainly do exist. This is an evaluation I think we all can agree on. And it's a fact that we'll simply have to realize now that no longer every new Wikipedia becomes an immediate success (like it was broadly the case in the early years) and sadly quite a few plainly fail to become what they are supposed to be (a comprehensive and reliable source of information).

What we need to do now is to clearly distinguish between the creation of premium encyclopedias and the advancement of languages. And we need to keep in focus what comes first, just like Jimbo pointed out. Being pessimistic about the prospects of a proposed Wikipedia for a language of, say, 5,000 speakers (who might all be at least as fluent in a more widespread language) should no longer be mistaken for being against that language or the promotion thereof.

Contrary to what has been written by others I fear that generously granting new editions for smaller languages can very well harm the project as a whole. The first time I heard about Wikipedia was on a German TV program. All I thought was: "Everyone can change it and write whatever they wants? It's another one of those anarchistic web projects and it I'm sure it will never amount to anything good. (Especially as there were some acceptable encyclopedias staffed with professional editors on the internet already)" But of course I was curious, too and checked it out one of the next days. And, surprisingly enough, I actually found the piece of information I was looking for. In the following time I came back now and then because the first impression had been a good one. Some day I actually tried and wrote a couple of sentences myself. Later I registered and even later I suscribed to this list and so forth. Not out idealism or the like. Just because I had gotten the impression that!
  Wikipedia is a project which is running well and which I can benefit from. Now please imagine this first encounter would have been with the Nauru or Muscogee edition. I just would not have found anything useful for me and I would never have come back to Wikipedia at all. Of course, every edition of Wikipedia must go through it's early stages. But our problem now is that many of them have been stuck there for ages and I fear quite a number will perhaps never leave that stage. And it is my conviction that a 100+ practically inactive Wikipedias certainly do not raise the project's reputation.

The only useful encyclopedia (I'm repeating myself here) is an encyclopedia were you find the article you need. To assure that you it takes literally tens of thousands of articles. An encyclopedia were most inqueries fail or produce unsuffincient, unreliable information is outright useless even if it is a nice community project. Again, it taken tens of thousands of articles. Let us face the fact that currently for probably most of the world's languages we can't generate them in an online project totally depending on unpaid volunteers.

I would therefore recommend that:

1. Whenever we evaluate new language proposals we should assess if they have the potential to yield a 5-digit number of articles.

2. We should require every new language proposal to be supported by at least two or three native speakers in order to assure there is some demand within that language community (instead of first setting up a new Wikipedia and then trying to convince native speakers).

3. We should require people interested in setting up a new Wikipedia to provide 20 basic encyclopedia articles before we establish that edition in order to have some start-up basis and to avoid "zero" article Wikipedias.

4. New constructed and extinct languages should not be allowed except proponents provide sufficient arguments that their language has a special potential for an extensive high quality online encyclopedia.

5. We should discuss new avenues for the advancement of small languages (minority, extinct, constructed) within Wikimedia, apart from Wikipedia.

Boris


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