Hoi, When having only 60 articles is a criterion for deletion of a Wikipedia project, there are many more projects in the danger zone. 50 of the current 250 Wikipedias do not have this number of articles. This is as far as I am concerned no valid reason.
The Klingon was ended because of the many people who were of the opinion that it was a blemish on the reputation of Wikipedia. When the end of this project was announced people cheered.. The good thing is that it ended an issue that people were quite happy to ask for it to be ended again and again.
Given that the tlh.wikipedia was ended by the board, it is and was final.
Thanks, GerardM
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
On 4/4/07, Muke Tever muke@frath.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:20:29 -0600, Dmcdevit dmcdevit@cox.net wrote:
Oldak Quill wrote:
I, for one, object to the closure of projects based on elitist concerns as to the origin of the language. What matters is the place of the language in the world now. This language is, crucially, recognised as a language by the International Standardisation Organisation
There is no sense of "recognition" in the ISO code designations. As they say for the 693-3 codes, "it is a goal for this part of ISO 639 to provide an identifier for every distinct human language that has been documented, whether living, extinct, or constructed, and whether its modality is spoken, written or signed." There are 7,589 currently.
tlh is also in ISO 639-2 as well, whose scope is more limited, codes being added to it "when it becomes apparent that a significant body of literature in a particular language exists."
The full criteria are here: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/criteria2.html (in brief, "that there is a significant body of literature in the language or describing the language".)
So I repeat, your choices are either to have a dictionary define
wordsusing words it does not define (Klingon words) or to define words (Klingonwords) that cannot be attested according to normal dictionary standards.
First off, what kind of attestation are you seeking here? There are published reference books on the language and several translations into Klingon have been made: Gilgamesh and a couple of Shakespeare plays are in print; online of course there's more, such as extensive selections from the Bible (linguist Nick Nicholas has the full text of the book of Mark on his website, among other things)... This is as much as if not more than many minority natural languages have.
I agree with Oldak about "elitist concerns as to the origin of the language". If Klingon (or any other language) is to be rejected it should be on at least moderately objective criteria, which would pertain to the language's present, not its origin--the bar can be higher for a constructed language, but it should at least be presented an opportunity to rise above its birth.
It seems [from what I can tell now] that the Klingon Wikipedia was closed down not because of any demerit in the language itself, but chiefly because it was not being used (having 60 articles at time of closing). tlh.wiktionary, it seems, has at least two currently-active users (its admins) and 2,311 content pages.
*Muke!-- website: http://frath.net/
Wiktionary-l mailing list Wiktionary-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l