[Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia

[Berto 'd Sera]

Hoi,

> It's really quite easy. A language is a dialect with an army and a 
> navy. But that's not the question.

Must be because of this that Switzerland and Austria have no language on
their own (no navy) :)

> 1) Are the participants prepared to accept a mixed-form or 
> standard-form wiki as representative of all speakers? For example, 
> this appears to be the case with modern English, where we have a mix 
> of two standard forms (US and UK), and where speakers of regional 
> dialects are happy to write in one of these standard forms.
It's dangerous to compare non-official languages to English or Spanish.
English doesn't have a bit of the tensions that are associated to
non-officially recognized minorities. So don't expect people to be cool,
calm and collected when they often think they are defending their right to
exist at political level (which does NOT happen with English or Spanish). 

Deciding whether people will be able to live with mixed scripts is quite a
bet. Most will actually depend on the ability of the admins. If they can
work to smooth problems and conflicts it will work, if a major ego-trip
starts it can break a community in no time. Also, pls consider that
basically all new wikies come from small linguistic entities, most of which
have no official status and are not taught in schools. This means having a
more radicalized feeling of "belonging into the culture" for those who work
for it, and it also makes a much smaller potential audience. Small numbers
make interpersonal relations simply sky-rocket the weight of their influence
over the final quality of a project.

Anyway, there is a possible software solution to all this: if we could
include dialects into an official "language" and tag them as such at page
level people could grow their space inside a bigger project.

This would kill the frequency of "personal fight based" secessions and would
help to share admin resources. It would also make a better human
environment, as people would not interpret such "new areas" as a betrayal or
a reduction of their current projects, but rather as an enlargement.

There's no magic wand anyway, all situations are pretty specific, yet there
are well identified trends that we can address.

Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html