If I may, I second the approval of the Inari Saami Wikipedia. Of course, my 
vote can be discarded since I'm involved in the project, but even if I weren't, 
I think this project should be approved since the quality of many articles is 
high enough that I use them as the source articles when creating articles into 
Northern Saami via translation.

-K


________________________________
From: Langcom <[email protected]> on behalf of Jon Harald 
Søby <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2020 11:16 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee <[email protected]>
Subject: [Langcom] Proposed approval of Inari Sámi Wikipedia

Hi all,

I would like to propose the approval of the Inari Sámi Wikipedia [1].

The activity has been good and stable all year, with several active 
contributors [2], and the most used messages have all been translated [3].

We can safely bypass the verification step for this project, since our very own 
Yupik is one of the active contributors and knows Inari Sámi; in addition, 
Trond Trosterud (User:Trondtr), who is a professor of Sámi language technology 
at the Giellatekno department of the University of Tromsø, is also one of the 
active contributors. Trondtr wrote a request for us to approve the Inari Sámi 
Wikipedia, which I'm pasting in its entirety below, as it gives a much better 
overview than what I could:


Proposal for a Wikipedia version for Inari Saami

We hereby propose that the Inari Saami incubator Wikipedia be converted into a 
full-fledged Wikipedia, smn.wikipedia.org<http://smn.wikipedia.org>


The language community


Inari Saami has appr. 450 speakers. This makes it a small language community in 
Wikipedia terms. It is still worth noting that Inari Saami is probably one of 
the most, if not the most successful revitalisation processes in the world. 
During the last decades the language community has organised language nests for 
a generation of Inari Saami children, and it has taught the language to key 
members of the middle generation. The third phase of the revitalisation, 
strengthening the literacy of the language, is now in its initial phase. This 
phase is named “100 new writers of Inari Saami” and has “1000 new pages of 
youth fiction” as one of its subprojects. The last decade has also seen 
language technology projects for Inari Saami, resulting in a spellchecker, 
comprehensive online dictionaries, keyboards with predictive writing, and 
programs for machine translation.


At present, Inari Saami is one of the four official languages of the Inari 
municipality and the Finnish Saami parliament. It is taught at all levels of 
instruction from kindergarten up to and including PhD level courses. The 
activists behind the “100 new writers of Inari Saami” are planning a campaign 
for children in high school to contribute to the Inari Saami Wikipedia.


The Wikipedia


Inari Saami has been in the incubator since 2012, with several quite good 
articles from an early stage. In spring 2020, the Inari Saami Language 
Association (Anarâškielâ servi) arranged Wikipedia writing workshops. Over the 
past six months, the Inari Saami Wikipedia version has seen edits every day, 
usually 30–50 edits a day. There are more than 1,000 articles and a substantial 
part of these are of good quality. The short articles form good and coherent 
article sets. Finnish municipalities, countries of the world, languages in the 
Uralic language family, Finnish authors, grammar and society are all such 
categories for which there is reasonably good coverage of short but informative 
articles. A list has also been made of the articles that are vital to the Inari 
Saami Wikipedia. As for localisation, the basic requirement has been met, as 
all strings in the set of core messages have been translated into Inari Saami.


We expect that a separate Wikipedia for Inari Saami will make it more visible 
than it is today, and make its users compare it with the much larger North 
Saami Wikipedia.

[1] https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/smn
[2] 
https://meta.toolforge.org/catanalysis/index.php?cat=0&title=Wp/smn&wiki=incubatorwiki
[3] https://robin.toolforge.org/?tool=codelookup&code=smn

--
mvh
Jon Harald Søby
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