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

[GerardM]

Hoi,
Two days is a reasonable amount of time for someone who knows what he is
doing to do a complete MediaWiki localisation. Experience suggests that when
the terminology is not readily available, it can take a week. A week as in
amount of time spend on the job not as in within a week it is ready.
Thanks,
    GerardM

On 7/18/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> Berto 'd Sera wrote:
>
> >>Just getting a minimal user interface in their language is a
> >>considerable challenge.
> >>
> >>
> >This is a myth. It takes 2 days to ONE person to fully localize
> Wikimedia.
> >And if you don't have one person willing to spend a couple of days (and
> >more) you won't get any server space anyway.
> >
> That two days assumes a reasonable degree of computer literacy among the
> affected people, and a stable symbolic representation of the language in
> question.  It also takes a tremendous effort to bridge the gap between
> the concepts of a highly technical society, and those of a pre-literate
> society whose language was suited to an agricultural or nomadic
> lifestyle.  The gap between Italian and Piedmontese is tiny by
> comparison; both are romance languages.
>
> >>Some of
> >>the languages from mountainous areas may not have the critical mass
> >>needed to keep them alive.
> >>
> >>
> >True. I'd say that most linguistic entities with only several thousands
> >native speakers left are in serious trouble, Western Europe included.
> Based
> >on what I saw thus far I seriously doubt that such small populations can
> >make any positive use of a wiki (and of anything else).
> >
> I was thinking of languages like Haida and Kootenai where ther are fewer
> than 100 native speakers.  What makes the latter interesting is that it
> is also a linguistic isolate.
>
> >They usually developed their cultures based on total insulation, while
> >living in places that offered very little food (like mountains, but also
> >tundra, deserts or jungles) but very good protection based on
> >inaccessibility, and can hardly stand the overwhelming cultural impact
> that
> >comes with a sudden increase of social connectivity.
> >
> In the great prairie areas of North America when food became scarce in
> one place it was relatively easy to travel to a better area.  The
> culture was built around such a nomadic existence, and became spread
> over a wider area.  In rain forests food tends to be more plentiful, and
> the barriers to migration are greater
>
> >Besides, basically all such entities are exposed to get the "social
> >stigmata". Most young people from the community will rather hide their
> >origins, trying to integrate in the dominant culture asap. When this
> happens
> >often the number of female speakers starts to contract, since mothers
> feel
> >they should provide their children with better "social identifiers". In
> time
> >this leads to a situation in which children can hear the linguistic
> entity
> >used only by elders.
> >
> Here there has been some reversal of this in recent years, but it may
> not be enough to undo the damage done by the cultural genocide of the
> residential schools where native children were taken from their families
> and put into an English environment where they were forbidden to speak
> their native languages.
>
> >When you have a big population (say millions) you often find a determined
> >minority wishing to "get their roots back", based on what they heard from
> >their elders. But if you start from just several thousands people your
> >statistical chances of success get very low.
> >
> >I can't see how you could change their social self-perception either. The
> >efforts of the Russian Government to protect the Veps minority did not
> keep
> >it from getting smaller and smaller, and the one Veps I know admitted to
> be
> >a Veps only years after we got to be friends, while perfectly knowing
> that
> >I'm the kind of person that can only have a positive impression of such a
> >thing.
> >
> The pride and positive self-perception cannot be supplied by outsiders.
> For the successful native populations in North America cultural revival
> has needed to be accompanied by economic opportunity within their own
> territories.  It also requires having a leadership that is capable of
> pulling a population out of chronic depression.
>
> >"Declaring yourself a Veps" in Karelia (among other things) means access
> to
> >special elite Moscow schools (there are a number of places reserved for
> >minorities). Yet, the number of people making such a declaration of
> identity
> >got 50% smaller since the help started to be given.
> >
> It says something about governments when they put such facilities in the
> capital instead of the indigenous territory where it would involve more
> people.  If the most capable individuals among the Veps are being
> marinaded in the culture of the capital they may no longer be useful to
> their own people.
>
> >Maybe for such desperate cases one should choose a conservative stance,
> like
> >saving all the material that can be saved (audio recordings, samples of
> >crafts, elements of grammar, etc). In such cases I don't think there's
> much
> >we can do as WMF, unless we open an entirely different set of projects
> and
> >start to work in close connection with UNESCO.
> >
> A lot of these documents could fit into the mandate of Wikisource.  It's
> also important not to get entangled in a lot of futile wranglings about
> intellectual property rights.  Bureaucratically waiting until 50 years
> after the apparent author's death simply because you cannot determine
> who has the rights can be highly damaging to some of this material.  All
> the people who can read and understand it now may not be alive in
> another 50 years.
>
> >No matter how you try, it cannot be done without some active "foreign"
> >intervention. So while helping mankind to save knowledge about itself it
> >will also push the linguistic entity towards death, by exposing it to an
> >enhanced foreign presence/influence/attention. This is why I'm saying
> that
> >such operations are dangerous in nature and they should be coordinated by
> >expert neutral parties like UNESCO.
> >
> God save us from the experts!
>
> Outsiders can provide the means in the form of such things as hardware,
> but they need to avoid introducing their expectations, and the
> presumptions that they take for granted.
>
> Ec
>
>
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