Re: [Langcom] Noongar Wikipedia

[Gnangarra]

Kaya

Thank you for a link to discussions that took place, for which I wasnt
aware of.  Noongar and English as I have explained have significant cross
over, such that english in Western Australia uses many words the two
languages blur together.  Additionally for many concepts including
counting, measuring of time, there are no noongar comparatives like wise
many words carry both a positive, a negative and plural meanings dependent
on use.  I know you would like to see to more Noongar language and these
will come with community growth. The incubator setup has become a barrier
to wider participation within a community where digital literacy is also
english dependent. The Noongar community has already showen great trust and
good faith in working with us, its our turn to reciprocate before we are at
an impasse who's negative impact will have a long lasting impediment to
Australian Indigenous knowledge being shared by Australian Indigenous
communities.

What I find disappointing is that not one member of the language committee
has made any attempt to actually contact myself or any other nys
contributor to get an understanding of the language, the culture, and the
history.Unfortunately despite many attempts to bring the decision
makers to Australia to gain an understanding of has continually fallen on
deaf ears. I find it rather surprising that the language committee sits in
judgement of a community, its knowledge, its culture, its worth, and
whether it contributes to the sum of all knowledge without ever making an
in person visit.


In the four years ago this project started with a question to Australian
Research Council of "Why was there no Noongar Wikipedia", the initial
response from the WMF was to engage lawyers and threaten the people who
asked. The ARC funded the Noongar community through 2 Universities.  That
community was hit hard by the WMF response, as a testament to the very
koort and weirn of the noonagr  they didnt give up.  They found local
wikipedians and I decide to help answer their question with "because no one
had tried".  Wikimedia Australia supported this work, we grew it from
multiple wikis hosted by WMAU into the incubator, along the way we built a
community of editors and helped develop some very skilled contributors.
Personally I unexpectedly embarked on a journey that despite growing up and
living in Western Australia I saw in the depths of some the worse depravity
created on basis of chosen ignorance and exercising of power.

We are custodians of knowledge, our role is to share the sum of all
knowledge to ensure that that knowledge is passed down to future
generations.  We are not here to decide which cultures knowledge will be
cast aside even if they live, speak, and write in two worlds.  We are
definitely not here to stand in judgement over culture because it doesnt
comply with the way in which European cultures expect, thats been tried
here for the last 200 odd years it doesnt work.   Our biggest problem with
Noongar language is that which was created by Europeans where because
individuals came from different cultures, British, French, German, Spanish,
Italian each recorded noongar as they wrote their own language and none
ever look at the whole of the community.  WMF has been able to pick the low
fruit with languages so far, I ask you to start picking the fruit higher up
the tree.  We havent come to the WMF or the language committee to beg to be
accepted, we are inviting you to joins us to learn, to understand , to
experience the true purpose of knowledge sharing.  To under take a journey
into cultures that have been sharing their knowledge freely for over 50,000
years and learn what it means to be custodians knowledge for future
generations.

Katitjiny-ang yennar
   knowledge belongs to all

On 3 April 2018 at 22:39, Amir E. Aharoni 
wrote:

> Hi Gideon,
>
> You write: "we use a lot of english".
>
> That is a major understatement. I didn't count precisely, but my
> impression is that it's more than 90% English. That's not "a lot of
> English", that's almost exclusively English.
>
> This incubator is not a draft for a Wikipedia in the Nyungar language.
> This is a draft for a wiki website with articles about the Nyungar people
> and culture, and it's mostly written in the English language.
>
> The existence of such a website is legitimate. It is even desirable for
> the Wikimedia movement to host such a site, given the known practical
> challenges of writing about non-Western cultures in Wikipedia in English
> and other major languages.
>
> The problem is that even though it's legitimate and desirable, it is just
> not something that the Language committee can approve because it is not
> similar to any other wiki site in the Wikimedia family of sites.
>
> A new kind of site could be created for this, but this is a discussion
> that must happen beyond the Language committee. The WMF board and the wide
> Wikimedia community must be involved in 

Re: [Langcom] Noongar Wikipedia

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hi Gideon,

You write: "we use a lot of english".

That is a major understatement. I didn't count precisely, but my impression
is that it's more than 90% English. That's not "a lot of English", that's
almost exclusively English.

This incubator is not a draft for a Wikipedia in the Nyungar language. This
is a draft for a wiki website with articles about the Nyungar people and
culture, and it's mostly written in the English language.

The existence of such a website is legitimate. It is even desirable for the
Wikimedia movement to host such a site, given the known practical
challenges of writing about non-Western cultures in Wikipedia in English
and other major languages.

The problem is that even though it's legitimate and desirable, it is just
not something that the Language committee can approve because it is not
similar to any other wiki site in the Wikimedia family of sites.

A new kind of site could be created for this, but this is a discussion that
must happen beyond the Language committee. The WMF board and the wide
Wikimedia community must be involved in discussing this. When such a
proposal is made in the right place, I may support it as a Wikimedia
community member, but I cannot support it as the Language committee member.

All of the above was already discussed on this mailing list publicly in
February. You can find the archive here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/langcom/2018-February/thread.html .



--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2018-04-02 8:53 GMT+03:00 Gnangarra :

> Kaya
>
> Well were to now, the noongar community met in good faith every condition
> asked of it during 2017 includinng those asked by the committee while I was
> in Berlin, In December we posted the final request after completing the
> required translations.  Following those request we received what can
> politely be describe as poor responses.
>
>  I wont be in Berlin this year to again find out what new hoops we will be
> required to jump through.  I can say the outcome has been very poor, there
> has been no existent communication from the committee as a committee.  At
> this stage does the WMAU abandon  capturing 50,000 years of Australian
> Indigenous knowledge from across 300 countries in their languages.
>
> The ball must now rest with the language committee because there is no way
> I could take what little comment we have received back to the wider Noongar
> community who daily deal with racism, knowledge appropriation, and being
> dismissed.
>
> The greatest lesson at the moment for Australian Indigenous knowledge is
> dont engage with Wikimedia Foundation, because despite them acting good
> faith the outcomes will be no different to past experiences.
>
> So why did we work with Noongar
>
>- they wanted to work with us, ie language community driven
>- its one of the largest language groups
>- it has a clearly defined country
>- it is supported by 5 Universities
>- its the most influential Indigenous languages and culture on any
>Australian community with the greatest uptake of indigenous words into the
>locally spoken english so much so that both the language spoken and the
>Western Australia culture is uniquely identifiable from the rest of
>Australia.
>- its spoken in some form by 25.m despite the statistics
>
> Our challenges was in knowing that there actually 14 associated dialects,
> that they have spellings directly impacted by the european who recorded
> them.  My process has always been not to use WMF as means of enforcing one
> dialect over another, hence why we use a lot of english in the learning and
> a reluctance to do further translations because each choice should come
> when the community is doing it through consensus not at the hand of
> myself
>
>
> --
> Gideon Digby
> Vice President - Wikimedia Australia
> M: 0434 986 852
> gnanga...@wikimedia.org.au
> http://wikimedia.org.au
>
> Wikimedia Australia Inc. is an independent charitable organisation which
> supports the efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation in Australia. Your
> donations keep the Wikimedia mission alive.
> *http://wikimedia.org.au/Donate *
>
>
>
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Re: [Langcom] Open Wikipedia requests dating to 2011 (third set)

[Steven White]

Gerard is far more opposed to macrolanguage projects than most of the other 
members here. Consistent with the way Amir put it, we need to be careful just 
how much we generalize on this topic: We "don't" want macrolanguages, but we 
also "don't" want projects in languages that are extremely close to each other, 
such that they're really mutually intelligible.  In some such cases, using the 
macrolanguage is going to be the most expedient approach, both linguistically 
and politically.


In this particular case, the test project for Marwari is coded with the 
macrolanguage code (mwr). But as it turns out, the principle constituent 
language of the macrolanguage is also called "Marwari", albeit with codes rwr 
(in India, in Devanagari) or mve (in Pakistan, in Perso-Arabic—which Ethnologue 
says "may or may not be the same as [rwr]"). There are also some related 
languages within the macrolanguage, some of which have very similar names 
(e.g., "Merwari", "Mewari").


I'll try to confirm with the one current contributor, but it's entirely 
possible that this test is entirely in the constituent language Marwari–rwr; in 
that case, I can change the langcode in the request and mark it eligible. But 
that said, I wonder if it's really better to do that, or better to let the test 
continue using the macrolanguage code.


Steven


Sent from Outlook



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Re: [Langcom] Noongar Wikipedia

[Michael Everson]

We are the language committee, though, and I have seen examples of text for 
this proposed Wikipedia which were in English with one or two words like “and” 
globally translated into Noongar. That’s… just not what our committee approves. 

And it’s not what the Wikipedia does. 

This doesn’t mean we don’t care about indigenous knowledge, but what I saw 
isn’t something I can support, from the point of view of linguistics.

It seems that a useful job to do might be to help the 14 associated dialects to 
converge on a standard orthography. 

Michael Everson


> On 2 Apr 2018, at 06:53, Gnangarra  wrote:
> 
> Our challenges was in knowing that there actually 14 associated dialects, 
> that they have spellings directly impacted by the european who recorded them. 
>  My process has always been not to use WMF as means of enforcing one dialect 
> over another, hence why we use a lot of english in the learning and a 
> reluctance to do further translations because each choice should come when 
> the community is doing it through consensus not at the hand of myself
> 


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Re: [Langcom] Noongar Wikipedia

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
As far as I am concerned there is only one issue. It is that a Wikipedia is
in the language it is supposed to be in. No English. A fixed orthography is
nice but it is not what the language committee requires.
Thanks,
   GerardM

On 2 April 2018 at 07:53, Gnangarra  wrote:

> Kaya
>
> Well were to now, the noongar community met in good faith every condition
> asked of it during 2017 includinng those asked by the committee while I was
> in Berlin, In December we posted the final request after completing the
> required translations.  Following those request we received what can
> politely be describe as poor responses.
>
>  I wont be in Berlin this year to again find out what new hoops we will be
> required to jump through.  I can say the outcome has been very poor, there
> has been no existent communication from the committee as a committee.  At
> this stage does the WMAU abandon  capturing 50,000 years of Australian
> Indigenous knowledge from across 300 countries in their languages.
>
> The ball must now rest with the language committee because there is no way
> I could take what little comment we have received back to the wider Noongar
> community who daily deal with racism, knowledge appropriation, and being
> dismissed.
>
> The greatest lesson at the moment for Australian Indigenous knowledge is
> dont engage with Wikimedia Foundation, because despite them acting good
> faith the outcomes will be no different to past experiences.
>
> So why did we work with Noongar
>
>- they wanted to work with us, ie language community driven
>- its one of the largest language groups
>- it has a clearly defined country
>- it is supported by 5 Universities
>- its the most influential Indigenous languages and culture on any
>Australian community with the greatest uptake of indigenous words into the
>locally spoken english so much so that both the language spoken and the
>Western Australia culture is uniquely identifiable from the rest of
>Australia.
>- its spoken in some form by 25.m despite the statistics
>
> Our challenges was in knowing that there actually 14 associated dialects,
> that they have spellings directly impacted by the european who recorded
> them.  My process has always been not to use WMF as means of enforcing one
> dialect over another, hence why we use a lot of english in the learning and
> a reluctance to do further translations because each choice should come
> when the community is doing it through consensus not at the hand of
> myself
>
>
> --
> Gideon Digby
> Vice President - Wikimedia Australia
> M: 0434 986 852
> gnanga...@wikimedia.org.au
> http://wikimedia.org.au
>
> Wikimedia Australia Inc. is an independent charitable organisation which
> supports the efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation in Australia. Your
> donations keep the Wikimedia mission alive.
> *http://wikimedia.org.au/Donate *
>
>
>
> ___
> Langcom mailing list
> Langcom@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>
>
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