Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Seb35, 26/04/2014 14:11: invent neologisms and terminology The five pillars have only been codified to a degree on global level, so one may care or not, but this would clearly be original research. And I say so as someone whose first edit in 2005 added some neologisms to Wiktionary; again, more forgivable than on Wikipedia. Building modern terminologies is important, [Semantic] MediaWiki provides an efficient and cheap infrastructure that more language academies/bodies should adopt. http://tieteentermipankki.fi/wiki/Termipankki:Etusivu/en Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Here are some bad and some good news... The bad news is that I've finally realized why I needed a separate wiki for data. It's about restrictive Ethnologue's ToS [1]. In other words, I could say to myself just: Welcome back to the wonderful world of licenses! So, I've created a private wiki with some of the data. Anyone willing to join me in data analysis work is welcome; I'll create accounts on that wiki. Said so, I urge to all relevant persons to contact me privately with preferred username. (And if I have to be more precise, this is related to the languages, chapters, WMF and its funds.) I also need one or more persons willing to code in Python. Good news is that I've realized that I did good job in coding, with a number of relevant categorizations; which triggers a bad news because I'd need some time to get familiarized with my code again. The data about the number of not represented languages on Wikimedia projects: * 23 languages with more than 10 millions of speakers * 230 languages with more than one million of speakers * 866 languages with more than 100 thousands of speakers * 1831 languages with more than 10 thousands of speakers The largest language with the project in Incubator has 38 millions of speakers. [1] http://www.ethnologue.com/terms-use On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 2:11 PM, Seb35 seb35wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: Hei, As a supporter of language diversity, I'm a bit sad of this thread because some people find we should not engage in language revitalisation because: 1/ it's not explicitely in our scope (and I don't fully aggree: sum of all knowledge also includes minority cultures expressed in their languages, as shown by Hubert Laska with the Kneip), 2/ it's too difficult/expansive to save most languages. Although there are obviously great difficulties, I find it shouldn't stop us to support or partnership with local languages institutions, particularly if there are interested people or volunteers: we are not obliged to select the 3000 more spoken languages and set up parterships to save these 3000 languages, but we can support institutions or volunteers _interested_ in saving some small language on a case-by-case basis (Rapa Nui, Chickasaw, Skolt Sami, Kibushi, whatever) if minimum requirements are met (writing system and ISO 639 code for a website, financial ressources for a project), i.e. crowdsourcing the language preservation between Wikimedia, volunteers, speakers, and institutions. When multilinguism in the cyberspace is discussed by linguists, Wikipedia is almost every time shown as *the* better successful example. As discussed in this thread, perhaps some projects (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikidata) are easier to set up in these languages and this could be a first step, but these will only preserve these as non-living objects of interest, at the contrary of a Wikibook/Wikipedia/Wikinews/Wikiversity where speakers could practice the language, invent neologisms and terminology, create corpora for linguists, and show the language to other interested people in the world (I'm sure there are). As an example in France, Wikimédia France has quite good relationships with the DGLFLF (Delegation for the French language and languages of France), and this institution census 75 languages in France, whose 2/3 are overseas [1]. The DGLFLF contributed ressources on some small languages and multilinguism on Wikibooks [2] and Commons [3]. [1] (fr) http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dglf/lgfrance/lgfrance_presentation.htm [2] (fr) https://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/États_généraux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer [3] (fr)(mul) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:États_généraux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer ~ Seb35 20.04.2014 05:46:47 (CEST), Milos Rancic kirjoitti: There are ~6000 languages in the world and around 3000 of them have more than 10,000 speakers. That approximation has some issues, but they are compensated by the ambiguity of the opposition. Ethnologue is not the best place to find precise data about the languages and it could count as languages just close varieties of one language, but it also doesn't count some other languages. Not all of the languages with 10,000 or more speakers have positive attitude toward their languages, but there are languages with smaller number of speakers with very positive attitude toward their own language. So, that number is what we could count as the realistic final number of the language editions of Wikimedia projects. At the moment, we have less than 300 language editions. * * * There is the question: Why should we do that? The answer is clear to me: Because we can. Yes, there are maybe more specific organizations which could do that, but it's not about expertise, but about ability. Fortunately, we don't need to search for historical examples for comparisons; the Internet is good enough. I still remember infographic of the time while all of us thought that Flickr is
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Hei, As a supporter of language diversity, I’m a bit sad of this thread because some people find we should not engage in language revitalisation because: 1/ it’s not explicitely in our scope (and I don’t fully aggree: sum of all knowledge also includes minority cultures expressed in their languages, as shown by Hubert Laska with the Kneip), 2/ it’s too difficult/expansive to save most languages. Although there are obviously great difficulties, I find it shouldn’t stop us to support or partnership with local languages institutions, particularly if there are interested people or volunteers: we are not obliged to select the 3000 more spoken languages and set up parterships to save these 3000 languages, but we can support institutions or volunteers _interested_ in saving some small language on a case-by-case basis (Rapa Nui, Chickasaw, Skolt Sami, Kibushi, whatever) if minimum requirements are met (writing system and ISO 639 code for a website, financial ressources for a project), i.e. crowdsourcing the language preservation between Wikimedia, volunteers, speakers, and institutions. When multilinguism in the cyberspace is discussed by linguists, Wikipedia is almost every time shown as *the* better successful example. As discussed in this thread, perhaps some projects (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikidata) are easier to set up in these languages and this could be a first step, but these will only preserve these as non-living objects of interest, at the contrary of a Wikibook/Wikipedia/Wikinews/Wikiversity where speakers could practice the language, invent neologisms and terminology, create corpora for linguists, and show the language to other interested people in the world (I’m sure there are). As an example in France, Wikimédia France has quite good relationships with the DGLFLF (Delegation for the French language and languages of France), and this institution census 75 languages in France, whose 2/3 are overseas [1]. The DGLFLF contributed ressources on some small languages and multilinguism on Wikibooks [2] and Commons [3]. [1] (fr) http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dglf/lgfrance/lgfrance_presentation.htm [2] (fr) https://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/États_généraux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer [3] (fr)(mul) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:États_généraux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer ~ Seb35 20.04.2014 05:46:47 (CEST), Milos Rancic kirjoitti: There are ~6000 languages in the world and around 3000 of them have more than 10,000 speakers. That approximation has some issues, but they are compensated by the ambiguity of the opposition. Ethnologue is not the best place to find precise data about the languages and it could count as languages just close varieties of one language, but it also doesn't count some other languages. Not all of the languages with 10,000 or more speakers have positive attitude toward their languages, but there are languages with smaller number of speakers with very positive attitude toward their own language. So, that number is what we could count as the realistic final number of the language editions of Wikimedia projects. At the moment, we have less than 300 language editions. * * * There is the question: Why should we do that? The answer is clear to me: Because we can. Yes, there are maybe more specific organizations which could do that, but it's not about expertise, but about ability. Fortunately, we don't need to search for historical examples for comparisons; the Internet is good enough. I still remember infographic of the time while all of us thought that Flickr is the place for images. It turned out that the biggest repository of images is actually Facebook, which had hundred times more of them than the Twitpic at the second place, which, in turn, had hundred times more of images than Flickr. In other words, the purpose of something and general perception of its purpose is not enough for doing good job. As well as comparisons between mismanaged internet projects and mismanaged traditional scientific and educational organizations are numerous. At this point of time Wikimedia all necessary capacities -- and even a will to take that job. So, we should start doing that, finally :) * * * There is also the question: How can we do that? In short, because of Wikipedia. I announced Microgrants project of Wikimedia Serbia yesterday. To be honest, we have very low expectations. When I said to Filip that I want to have 10 active community members after the project, he said that I am overambitious. Yes, I am. But ten hours later I've got the first response and I was very positively surprised by a lot of things. The most relevant for this story is that a person from a city in Serbia proper is very enthusiastic about Wikipedia and contributing to it (and organizing contributors in the area). I didn't hear that for years! (Maybe I was just too pessimistic because of my obsession with statistics.) Keeping in mind her position (she said that she was
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Seb, I agree with you 100%. We need to advertise more clearly how the current projects, without modification of scope and purpose, can be useful tools and platforms for linguists and preservationists to extend and share their work. In the US, we have had good relations with the Long Now Foundation which runs the Rosetta Project to preserve languages. On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 8:11 AM, Seb35 seb35wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: Hei, As a supporter of language diversity, I’m a bit sad of this thread because some people find we should not engage in language revitalisation because: 1/ it’s not explicitely in our scope (and I don’t fully aggree: sum of all knowledge also includes minority cultures expressed in their languages, as shown by Hubert Laska with the Kneip), 2/ it’s too difficult/expansive to save most languages. Although there are obviously great difficulties, I find it shouldn’t stop us to support or partnership with local languages institutions, particularly if there are interested people or volunteers: we are not obliged to select the 3000 more spoken languages and set up parterships to save these 3000 languages, but we can support institutions or volunteers _interested_ in saving some small language on a case-by-case basis (Rapa Nui, Chickasaw, Skolt Sami, Kibushi, whatever) if minimum requirements are met (writing system and ISO 639 code for a website, financial ressources for a project), i.e. crowdsourcing the language preservation between Wikimedia, volunteers, speakers, and institutions. When multilinguism in the cyberspace is discussed by linguists, Wikipedia is almost every time shown as *the* better successful example. As discussed in this thread, perhaps some projects (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikidata) are easier to set up in these languages and this could be a first step, but these will only preserve these as non-living objects of interest, at the contrary of a Wikibook/Wikipedia/Wikinews/Wikiversity where speakers could practice the language, invent neologisms and terminology, create corpora for linguists, and show the language to other interested people in the world (I’m sure there are). As an example in France, Wikimédia France has quite good relationships with the DGLFLF (Delegation for the French language and languages of France), and this institution census 75 languages in France, whose 2/3 are overseas [1]. The DGLFLF contributed ressources on some small languages and multilinguism on Wikibooks [2] and Commons [3]. [1] (fr) http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dglf/lgfrance/lgfrance_presentation.htm [2] (fr) https://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/États_généraux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer [3] (fr)(mul) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:États_généraux_du_multilinguisme_dans_les_outre-mer ~ Seb35 20.04.2014 05:46:47 (CEST), Milos Rancic kirjoitti: There are ~6000 languages in the world and around 3000 of them have more than 10,000 speakers. That approximation has some issues, but they are compensated by the ambiguity of the opposition. Ethnologue is not the best place to find precise data about the languages and it could count as languages just close varieties of one language, but it also doesn't count some other languages. Not all of the languages with 10,000 or more speakers have positive attitude toward their languages, but there are languages with smaller number of speakers with very positive attitude toward their own language. So, that number is what we could count as the realistic final number of the language editions of Wikimedia projects. At the moment, we have less than 300 language editions. * * * There is the question: Why should we do that? The answer is clear to me: Because we can. Yes, there are maybe more specific organizations which could do that, but it's not about expertise, but about ability. Fortunately, we don't need to search for historical examples for comparisons; the Internet is good enough. I still remember infographic of the time while all of us thought that Flickr is the place for images. It turned out that the biggest repository of images is actually Facebook, which had hundred times more of them than the Twitpic at the second place, which, in turn, had hundred times more of images than Flickr. In other words, the purpose of something and general perception of its purpose is not enough for doing good job. As well as comparisons between mismanaged internet projects and mismanaged traditional scientific and educational organizations are numerous. At this point of time Wikimedia all necessary capacities -- and even a will to take that job. So, we should start doing that, finally :) * * * There is also the question: How can we do that? In short, because of Wikipedia. I announced Microgrants project of Wikimedia Serbia yesterday. To be honest, we have very low expectations. When I said to Filip that I want to have 10 active community members after the project,
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Comet styles, 24/04/2014 00:57: on the left of whatever page in their vernacular language welcoming them and asking them if they want to be part of Wikipedia Fiji with a direct link to that language wikipedia's This will be achieved by the following two features combined when/if made default: * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/Design/Interlanguage_links/Compact_interlanguage_links_as_a_beta_feature * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation ** https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Entry_points Even worse when the article doesn't exist in the language you searched. * On Special:Search and noarticletext (red link filler) you can now add wdsearch on your wiki: http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=108 ** Cf. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47979 * On the multilingual portals the search is not multilingual. SPQRobin did something here but I don't find a bug report. Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
A few years back i came with an idea, I know wikimedia is not fond of advertisements but what if we advertise wikipedia? There is a nice big EMPTY space on the bottom left side of wikipedia. Make a script/feature/extension which detects the person browsing the wiki's IP and shows them a link to their country's wiki (disabled for logged in users)so for example if it detects the ip is from Fiji, there will be a small advert on the left of whatever page in their vernacular language welcoming them and asking them if they want to be part of Wikipedia Fiji with a direct link to that language wikipedia's main page...Google and other sites use similar methods to filter their adverts so why not use this in a better way? Most people are not aware of the existence of certain language wikis and most users for whom English isn't a first language may prefer to read article in a language they understand... -- Cometstyles ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
El 21/04/2014 02:15 a.m., Asaf Bartov escribió: 3. An example: some time ago, our colleagues in Chile wanted to spend (not a lot of) movement funds on printing the Welcome to Wikipedia booklet in Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui is (perhaps) spoken by fewer than 3000 people, no doubt mostly without facility with or regular access to the Internet. There is not, and there never will be, a Wikipedia that is a useful reference source in Rapa Nui. And that's okay, because there is also not, and never will be, a person on this planet who _needs_ free knowledge in Rapa Nui, that is, who cannot consume knowledge in another language (indeed, I dare wager fully 100% of Rapa Nui speakers not only _can_ consume knowledge in Spanish, but would _prefer_ to do so. In practical terms, I mean, e.g. if they needed medical information and had a page of Rapa Nui and a page of Spanish providing that information before them). Speakers of minority languages, and especially, aboriginal languages, have for hundreds of years been used or forced to rely on a dominant/colonial language (in this particular case, Spanish) to access information unrelated to their own culture -medicine, science, technology, world history-. That does not exactly mean they _prefer_ to use it. 4. What does interest me, as a grantmaker, is where to draw the line between the Rapa Nui end of the spectrum and languages that, with some active promotion, could well become useful and much-needed reference sources in some cultures. In other words, *what are the prerequisites for a viable Wikipedia in a given language?* At least good odds for one. Instinctively, I think those prerequisites would be some combination of: - number of literate speakers with Internet access (audience) - number of literate speakers with Internet access, education, and spare time (prospective editors) - availability of secondary sources in that language - availability of news sources in that language - reasonable way to type the language into a computer Of these, only the last one is something we can do something about (and indeed have been doing). I would welcome some thinking from all interested, including the Language Committee, on what might a reasonable set of criteria be for a language we would consider it reasonable to promote a _Wikipedia_ in. In this part, I agree more with you and still think that a Wiktionary and a Wikisource would help more the speakers of a particular language to enter the wiki-world, with a fully functional Wikipedia being the next stage; I still remember there was a Wikipedia, the Afar Wikipedia, with ONE article. That did not make any sense to me. M. -- *Jülüjain wane mmakat* ein kapülain tü alijunakalirua jee wayuukanairua junain ekerolaa alümüin supüshuwayale etijaanaka. Ayatashi waya junain. Carlos M. Colina Vicepresidente, A.C. Wikimedia Venezuela | RIF J-40129321-2 | www.wikimedia.org.ve http://wikimedia.org.ve Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Affiliations Committee Phone: +972-52-4869915 Twitter: @maor_x ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Milos Rancic, 21/04/2014 00:18: * Nemo, the right approach is: those projects failed and there are reasons for that. What are the reasons? How can we fix it in future cases? How can we revive failed projects? I don't accept not possible answer:) Sometimes you have to accept it. :) I only talk of what I know; in the case of lmo.wiki, it's not possible because lmo doesn't exist. For a milanese like me it's easier to understand French than Bergamo dialect. Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Hello Milos, welcome back. Basically I agree with your attitude, with one difference: I don't think that anyone can help languages survive. What we can do, is to help conserve them. Greetings Ting ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
This is not quite correct. It's very hard, but possible. But Wikimedia alone cannot do it. Wikimedia can be one of the tools that are used by the cultural elite, which Milos brought up. Each of these languages needs people like [[Pompeu Fabra]] and [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] and, dare I say, [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]]. That's the sine qua non. Wikimedia is just a tool - a very important one, but not the main one. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 14:20 GMT+03:00 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: Hello Milos, welcome back. Basically I agree with your attitude, with one difference: I don't think that anyone can help languages survive. What we can do, is to help conserve them. Greetings Ting ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
[snip] For the things we could do, I quote form other people: * encourage Wikisource, Commons, Wiktionary as primary projects for new/endangered languages. You could scan books or documents if the language is written, or record audio/interviews and put that on Commons if t the language is just oral. or we could do both. * we can work on a kickstart Wikisource workflow, we are alreading discussing this on the Wikisource mailing list (Ganesh and other Nepalese folks are interested in developing a Nepalese Wikisource). * we can work on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary and try to takle the huge challenge of a real semantic wiktionary using Wikidata. That's a tough one, but i can't wait it to happen. All these 3 points are mid-term and reachable. as others said, they are just tools, and for preserving a language, not make it survive. Aubrey (sorry for poor english, just before coffee) On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: This is not quite correct. It's very hard, but possible. But Wikimedia alone cannot do it. Wikimedia can be one of the tools that are used by the cultural elite, which Milos brought up. Each of these languages needs people like [[Pompeu Fabra]] and [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] and, dare I say, [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]]. That's the sine qua non. Wikimedia is just a tool - a very important one, but not the main one. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 14:20 GMT+03:00 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: Hello Milos, welcome back. Basically I agree with your attitude, with one difference: I don't think that anyone can help languages survive. What we can do, is to help conserve them. Greetings Ting ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
I'd certainly take quite a broad view of which languages fulfill our mission. Certainly I wouldn't be comfortable with arguments as simple as All people who speak Y also read X, so there's no purpose putting resources into Y. Wikimedia UK does little work with Gaelic, but quite a bit with Welsh; I wonder if Robin Owain reads this list? He's a good person to speak to about this. Chris On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: This is not quite correct. It's very hard, but possible. But Wikimedia alone cannot do it. Wikimedia can be one of the tools that are used by the cultural elite, which Milos brought up. Each of these languages needs people like [[Pompeu Fabra]] and [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] and, dare I say, [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]]. That's the sine qua non. Wikimedia is just a tool - a very important one, but not the main one. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 14:20 GMT+03:00 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: Hello Milos, welcome back. Basically I agree with your attitude, with one difference: I don't think that anyone can help languages survive. What we can do, is to help conserve them. Greetings Ting ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
I cannot cite anything, but there should be studies that show that even though most people are bilingual or reported as bilingual in their regional language and another major language, they are more comfortable in getting education in their regional language. I'm pretty sure that there are such cases, and they should be given priority. Projects that are focused on language revitalization per se should be given less priority when resources are limited, even though it breaks my heart to say this. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 15:25 GMT+03:00 Chris Keating chriskeatingw...@gmail.com: I'd certainly take quite a broad view of which languages fulfill our mission. Certainly I wouldn't be comfortable with arguments as simple as All people who speak Y also read X, so there's no purpose putting resources into Y. Wikimedia UK does little work with Gaelic, but quite a bit with Welsh; I wonder if Robin Owain reads this list? He's a good person to speak to about this. Chris On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: This is not quite correct. It's very hard, but possible. But Wikimedia alone cannot do it. Wikimedia can be one of the tools that are used by the cultural elite, which Milos brought up. Each of these languages needs people like [[Pompeu Fabra]] and [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] and, dare I say, [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]]. That's the sine qua non. Wikimedia is just a tool - a very important one, but not the main one. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 14:20 GMT+03:00 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: Hello Milos, welcome back. Basically I agree with your attitude, with one difference: I don't think that anyone can help languages survive. What we can do, is to help conserve them. Greetings Ting ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: This is not quite correct. It's very hard, but possible. But Wikimedia alone cannot do it. Wikimedia can be one of the tools that are used by the cultural elite, which Milos brought up. Each of these languages needs people like [[Pompeu Fabra]] and [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] and, dare I say, [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]]. That's the sine qua non. Wikimedia is just a tool - a very important one, but not the main one. In the case of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, there is a not widely known fact that he was actually hard worker willing to listen others. He was a villager from Serbia, sent to Austria and Germany to learn how to help his people. In relation to gathering spoken folk tradition, he was listening brothers Grimm. But, more importantly, the ideology and actually the final form of the modern Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, as well as Vuk's logistics in Vienna were the product of a Slovene [[Jernej Kopitar]]. In our case, we need to find those hard workers all over the small ethno-linguistic communities, explain what they should do for themselves and give them logistics. That, of course, *if* they are willing to that part of job for their communities and *if* they want to build their knowledge in the form of Wikimedia projects. BTW, I know that what I said above sounds enlightenmentish, with all of the traps of that way of thinking. However, it's not about how they should live. It's about how they could adopt our technology *if* they want. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
With this I agree. If this depended on me, I'd give this resources. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 15:43 GMT+03:00 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: This is not quite correct. It's very hard, but possible. But Wikimedia alone cannot do it. Wikimedia can be one of the tools that are used by the cultural elite, which Milos brought up. Each of these languages needs people like [[Pompeu Fabra]] and [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] and, dare I say, [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]]. That's the sine qua non. Wikimedia is just a tool - a very important one, but not the main one. In the case of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, there is a not widely known fact that he was actually hard worker willing to listen others. He was a villager from Serbia, sent to Austria and Germany to learn how to help his people. In relation to gathering spoken folk tradition, he was listening brothers Grimm. But, more importantly, the ideology and actually the final form of the modern Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, as well as Vuk's logistics in Vienna were the product of a Slovene [[Jernej Kopitar]]. In our case, we need to find those hard workers all over the small ethno-linguistic communities, explain what they should do for themselves and give them logistics. That, of course, *if* they are willing to that part of job for their communities and *if* they want to build their knowledge in the form of Wikimedia projects. BTW, I know that what I said above sounds enlightenmentish, with all of the traps of that way of thinking. However, it's not about how they should live. It's about how they could adopt our technology *if* they want. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: Projects that are focused on language revitalization per se should be given less priority when resources are limited, even though it breaks my heart to say this. I don't think that we are dealing here with limited resources. After we show what we are doing and how successful we are (assuming that we'll be successful, of course :D ), I am sure that funds won't be limited just on WMF's budget. However, we are dealing with limited resources at the beginning and, basically, not seen scale of the job, with a lot of potential issues. I don't think that we'll come into the stable phase in less than five years of work. And it's true that this is enough time to see negative changes in some of the languages. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Chris Keating chriskeatingw...@gmail.com wrote: Wikimedia UK does little work with Gaelic, but quite a bit with Welsh; I wonder if Robin Owain reads this list? He's a good person to speak to about this. I mentioned Scots Gaelic with a good reason. Not counting languages with so small number of speakers, that statistics for them are not relevant and not counting Sanskrit, known to a lot of linguists, gd.wikipedia.org is Wikipedia with the highest relative number of active editors. That means that it's the best starting point to raise that number from 157 per million to ~1000 per million. If WM UK would be successful in achieving that goal, we'd know that it's possible. And we'll have some ideas how to do that. [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: That means that it's the best starting point to raise that number from 157 per million to ~1000 per million. If WM UK would be successful in achieving that goal, we'd know that it's possible. And we'll have some ideas how to do that. In real numbers: We need there 100 active editors. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: That means that it's the best starting point to raise that number from 157 per million to ~1000 per million. If WM UK would be successful in achieving that goal, we'd know that it's possible. And we'll have some ideas how to do that. In real numbers: We need there 100 active editors. Sorry, 70. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
How many languages exist? |_ How many languages have written works? |_How many languages have UNICODE support? That is the max number of Wikisource projects we can create :-P 2014-04-22 15:12 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: That means that it's the best starting point to raise that number from 157 per million to ~1000 per million. If WM UK would be successful in achieving that goal, we'd know that it's possible. And we'll have some ideas how to do that. In real numbers: We need there 100 active editors. Sorry, 70. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Unicode support is not that big of a deal. It's growing all the time, and the Unicode standard itself is ahead of Wikipedia and will likely remain ahead of it for a while. The operating systems' actual support for it is far from perfect, but it isn't a huge in itself either. Existence of written works is not a problem in itself at all. Theoretically, a Wikipedia can be written completely based on foreign-language sources. The challenge is to actually get people who speak languages that don't have written works to start creating the first written work. It's not impossible, but it's culturally challenging. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 16:51 GMT+03:00 Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada emi...@gmail.com: How many languages exist? |_ How many languages have written works? |_How many languages have UNICODE support? That is the max number of Wikisource projects we can create :-P 2014-04-22 15:12 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: That means that it's the best starting point to raise that number from 157 per million to ~1000 per million. If WM UK would be successful in achieving that goal, we'd know that it's possible. And we'll have some ideas how to do that. In real numbers: We need there 100 active editors. Sorry, 70. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: I cannot cite anything, but there should be studies that show that even though most people are bilingual or reported as bilingual in their regional language and another major language, they are more comfortable in getting education in their regional language. I've not followed the referenced studies, but from about page 27 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED540509.pdf (Why and How Africa Should Invest in African Languages and Multilingual Education: An Evidence- and Practice-Based Policy Advocacy Brief) claims this. This and maybe others are citations in Shaver, Lea, Copyright and Inequality (February 18, 2014). Washington University Law Review, Forthcoming; Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Research Paper No. 2014-3. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2398373 a large part of which is a case study of book famine in neglected languages of South Africa. I found the paper compelling, so much so that I read it aloud for those who prefer listening https://archive.org/details/LeaShaverCopyrightAndInequality(the paper is CC-BY) and blogged about it at http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/02/27/shaver-copyright-inequality/ The paper struck me as a validation of Wikimedia's language efforts so far, and an indication that these are undervalued -- I mean from a perspective recognizing their welfare contribution, not necessarily in terms of Wikimedia resources, of which I'm largely ignorant -- but despite my ignorance, maybe such valuation ought to encourage even more audacious language work, in the Wikimedia movement or nearby. I made some pedestrian suggestions in the blog post above, but let me highlight one that is pure fantasy born of my ignorance: Could recognition of the value of neglected languages provide an impetus for a new and large effort toward free software machine translation? Little progress has been made thus far, perhaps in part because some proprietary services such as Google Translate are gratis, and work for most non-neglected languages. Could redoubled effort to support neglected languages in Wikimedia projects (Wikisource translations might be especially relevant) and free/open source software projects help provide needed parallel corpora? I'm pretty sure that there are such cases, and they should be given priority. Projects that are focused on language revitalization per se should be given less priority when resources are limited, even though it breaks my heart to say this. Makes sense to me. Mike ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
I second what Amir is saying, although I understand the heartbreak. Ido On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 4:10 PM, wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.orgwrote: Send Wikimedia-l mailing list submissions to wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org You can reach the person managing the list at wikimedia-l-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of Wikimedia-l digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: How Wikimedia could help languages to survive (Andrea Zanni) 2. Re: How Wikimedia could help languages to survive (Chris Keating) 3. Re: How Wikimedia could help languages to survive (Amir E. Aharoni) 4. Re: How Wikimedia could help languages to survive (Milos Rancic) 5. Re: How Wikimedia could help languages to survive (Amir E. Aharoni) 6. Re: How Wikimedia could help languages to survive (Milos Rancic) 7. Re: How Wikimedia could help languages to survive (Milos Rancic) -- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:18:53 +0200 From: Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive Message-ID: CAC=VxyZAz5t13GKr9P8zFtNztQOiMwgJo+_-eECzZ-g3w= e...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 [snip] For the things we could do, I quote form other people: * encourage Wikisource, Commons, Wiktionary as primary projects for new/endangered languages. You could scan books or documents if the language is written, or record audio/interviews and put that on Commons if t the language is just oral. or we could do both. * we can work on a kickstart Wikisource workflow, we are alreading discussing this on the Wikisource mailing list (Ganesh and other Nepalese folks are interested in developing a Nepalese Wikisource). * we can work on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary and try to takle the huge challenge of a real semantic wiktionary using Wikidata. That's a tough one, but i can't wait it to happen. All these 3 points are mid-term and reachable. as others said, they are just tools, and for preserving a language, not make it survive. Aubrey (sorry for poor english, just before coffee) On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: This is not quite correct. It's very hard, but possible. But Wikimedia alone cannot do it. Wikimedia can be one of the tools that are used by the cultural elite, which Milos brought up. Each of these languages needs people like [[Pompeu Fabra]] and [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] and, dare I say, [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]]. That's the sine qua non. Wikimedia is just a tool - a very important one, but not the main one. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-04-22 14:20 GMT+03:00 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: Hello Milos, welcome back. Basically I agree with your attitude, with one difference: I don't think that anyone can help languages survive. What we can do, is to help conserve them. Greetings Ting ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Message: 2 Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 13:25:54 +0100 From: Chris Keating chriskeatingw...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive Message-ID: CAFche1o5L12Qvr30cPJaCp7O47iVMF2ema6YZn=JX72W= ve...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 I'd certainly take quite a broad view of which languages fulfill our mission. Certainly I wouldn't be comfortable with arguments as simple as All people who speak Y also read X, so there's no purpose putting resources into Y. Wikimedia UK does little work with Gaelic, but quite a bit with Welsh; I wonder if Robin Owain reads this list? He's a good person to speak to about this. Chris On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 5:18 AM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andre...@gmail.comwrote: [snip] For the things we could do, I quote form other people: * encourage Wikisource, Commons, Wiktionary as primary projects for new/endangered languages. You could scan books or documents if the language is written, or record audio/interviews and put that on Commons if t the language is just oral. or we could do both. +1. I can imagine those working on languages already being able to do things like record vocabulary and audio clips from native speakers, which we (online Wikimedia volunteers!) can, if we have good associated metadata, help format and make available on Commons. It could be a whole outreach area into free-ing up this kind of knowledge, which we've barely scraped the surface of. Recordings of words in thousands of languages on Wiktionary! We have so much to do. To Mike's point, yes, I can imagine better translation work happening in underserved languages -- a problem for researchers and programmers and linguists to collaborate on. From the outreach point of view, I have also been kicking around the idea of using language classes to help kickstart some Wikipedias. For instance, some African language Wikipedias are so small that contributions from just a few people in an advanced class studying that language (and they do exist, though there's not a lot) could help improve the content a lot. It seems like for some languages there could be the possibility to work with specialty language institutes around the world. As for resources, it's partly money, yes -- our money is not infinite -- but even more so I think it's a problem of limited human resources, especially in the case of languages that are not spoken by many people. Finding and helping contributors who speak the language well enough, have online access, some technical skill, and are interested in contributing or translating is the major issue. That problem becomes more acute the smaller the language, which is why I like the idea of an effort to free up existing language resources. -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Asaf Bartov abar...@wikimedia.org wrote: Interesting thoughts. I have a few brief comments, and will engage further (on Meta, perhaps) later: 2. This does include free knowledge _about_ every last language of the world, so by all means: let us preserve all languages' written output on Wikisource, and let us document all languages' lexicons on Wiktionary (not their own Wiktionary, but active Wiktionaries with existing editing communities), but we should not unconditionally spend resources to ensure the availability of free knowledge _in_ every last language. I submit that our vision is satisfied by offering free knowledge in the languages people use to consume knowledge (a far _far_ smaller subset of even the 280-odd language editions we already have). I like this thought a lot, and I don't think it's inconsistent with Milos' proposal to save languages. Saving languages, at least as a first-pass step, might not mean creating a Wikipedia in that language, but rather working to make as much as has already been published in those languages, and their lexicons and dictionaries, free and available on Wikisource, Wikitionary, Wikibooks, etc. One thing that makes me sad about small and very small languages is that often there are only one or two dictionaries, and only a few books about the languages, and these are published by small publishing houses that can't really keep them in print or distribute them easily to everyone who might be interested (and they can't possibly be great money makers for the publisher, either)*. Similarly, online resources and lexicons are often haphazardly published on unstable servers which may or may not stay up. In other words, resources *about* languages, which are the first step in preserving the language, often suffer from simple access issues themselves, and would be worth effort -- the kind of effort that we are expert in, like stable hosting and making works available under free licenses. -- Phoebe * Most recently I was thinking about this when I was in Oklahoma and visited a small museum that had books in and about the Chickasaw language, which is severely endangered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickasaw_language. -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On 20 April 2014 04:46, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: I'd say that Scots Gaelic could be a good test (Wikimedia UK help needed!). It's a language with ~70k of speakers and if it's possible to achieve 100 active editors per month, we could say that it could somehow work in other cases, as well. Err they are about to have a referendum on independence -- geni ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Hi Milos, at the same time when you are concerned about the collection / preservation of thousands of languages, I will briefly introduce a project that currently takes place in Austria together with the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This project has the same goal direction, which you mention, even if we might go another way. Our way is at first the acquisition of languages, micro languages, language varieties and dialects. The basis of this work it will be, by a software (which has yet to be made ) to capture the regional characteristics of the language. written as a word, as a phrase, and then of course the regional peculiarities in pronunciation, using and producing audio files. Subsequently, there will be regional wikis to bring on a simple level, people to represent their knowledge. This is important especially in the german Wikipedia, because now it is almost impossible to enter de:WP as a freshman. The claims are completely covered, we lose an enormous number of authors and win hardly newones. In the meantime, it is already partially so that even the articles are no longer readable because they just follow an off-hook academic claim, not the demands of most of our readers. You are speaking about languages, Milos , of which you accept that it is as a official standard language with an appropriate written version. Here you will (and we will) encounter the first boundaries. The most important part for me of your writing is that you're worried about the fact that we constantly lose authors. So you're absolutely right. In our projects we often ignore the fact that knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of the educated class alone, we find knowledge even in places where you least expect it. Currently it is so that access to Wikipedia, especially in the developed versions with 100,000 articles, already excludes many people to participate. The challenge is simply too difficult. Language does not stand alonefor itself, language is strongly tied to the culture. And this culture is often - I am referring to the German-language Wikipedia - already in a kind of elitist form of us even reproduced and filtered. But why should a language and word-collecting software make it possible to attract new authors and to enable new areas of knowledge acquisition? By being brave and just go new ways!Wikipedia is 13 years old and has not changed in its basic concept. But this basic concept is, in my view, in many ways no more purposeful in order to meet the requirements for different classes of readers and writers. Though I know that language does not stands on its own, so I also know that culture is not just a part of everyday life of humans, the life is the culture itself. But this isoften perceived by the elitists not as culture but as folklore. Just as we perceive dialects as a language of the subordinate social classes and as such also denote such languages as dialectsso that the apparent superiority of a so-called high-level language can be brought to the fore. When we talk about knowledge, then we always talk about written knowledge in a standardized form. However, we lose a large part of the knowledge by the fact that our culture is changing , our tools, our traditional professions. But that also disappears the diversity of our culture. If you look at the tools of a cobbler, then you will find there a piece of steel which is called in german Kneip. It is for the shoemaker, the most important of all tools in addition to the hammer. Today we no longer findshoemakers. Until a few years ago there were shoemakers in every street, in every small town. Probably in serbia or Belgrade, you will find more than we have here in Vienna, Austria and Germany together. And because this piece of steel , Kneip, wich is so extremely efficient and above all extremely cheap, it was formerly in every private toolbox. Together with a grindstone . Today it is called the Stanley knife, but it can not compete at least with the quality of Kneip. But we still have the word Kneip. And as long this word exists and people know what it means, as long this tool exists. If only in our consciousness. But when the word disappears , then the tool is finally gone. And thus also a part of our culture. This is just a small example of how important it is to preserve the language in its diverse form. The same applies to languages. Each language is significant because it is originated in and out of a very special cultural situation. If this culture could retain without influence from outside, eventually it will become a own language,because it is different from the more changing main language. If you understand Yiddish - which is understood as a separate language - then you know about how people may have spoken German several hundred years ago. Although, of course, Yiddish has also evolved. And even the main spoken language in Vienna, wich is in parts
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Am 20.04.2014 08:38, schrieb geni: On 20 April 2014 04:46, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: I'd say that Scots Gaelic could be a good test (Wikimedia UK help needed!). It's a language with ~70k of speakers and if it's possible to achieve 100 active editors per month, we could say that it could somehow work in other cases, as well. Err they are about to have a referendum on independence What do you want to say with that? That it is thus no longer necessary, gaelic to lead as an example? Wikipedia does´nt end at national borders! Hubertl ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On 20 April 2014 09:32, Hubert Laska hubert.la...@gmx.at wrote: What do you want to say with that? That it is thus no longer necessary, gaelic to lead as an example? Wikipedia does´nt end at national borders! Wikimedia UK however does. There is also the issue of changing political status. While Westminister may not be overly concerned with regards to Gaelic we can't predict how an independent Holyrood would react. -- geni ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Milos Rancic, 20/04/2014 05:46: Why should we do that? The answer is clear to me: Because we can. Can we? There is no evidence that our minuscule wikipedias have had any influence whatsoever on unofficial languages like, say, the alleged lumbard (lmo) dialect. It's probably more effective to just publish/polish/distribute (on Wikisource or Wiktionary) ONE book which had an actual effect on that language, like (for Italian dialects) Porta's and Belli's. Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Sun, 20 Apr 2014, geni wrote: On 20 April 2014 09:32, Hubert Laska hubert.la...@gmx.at wrote: What do you want to say with that? That it is thus no longer necessary, gaelic to lead as an example? Wikipedia does´nt end at national borders! Wikimedia UK however does. There is also the issue of changing political status. While Westminister may not be overly concerned with regards to Gaelic we can't predict how an independent Holyrood would react. If Scotland votes for independence, it will not become a separate country until March 2016 at the earliest. Until such time WMUK is the local chapter for Scotland. It may continue to be after that time, as details of what happens to WMUK in the event of a yes vote are at present undefined, but continuing as one organisation covering both countries is a possibility. Even if it doesn't, a project started by WMUK now could easily be handed over to a Wikimedia Scotland - not unlikely with the same people at the helm. Chris McKenna cmcke...@sucs.org www.sucs.org/~cmckenna The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart Antoine de Saint Exupery ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
imo there are a whole bunch of organizations and projects much better aimed and developed towards this question; I'd rather map them and contact the most developed ones instead of reinventing the wheel. Cheers, Balazs PS: This because we can reasoning is very very thin btw. (source?) 2014-04-20 5:46 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: There are ~6000 languages in the world and around 3000 of them have more than 10,000 speakers. That approximation has some issues, but they are compensated by the ambiguity of the opposition. Ethnologue is not the best place to find precise data about the languages and it could count as languages just close varieties of one language, but it also doesn't count some other languages. Not all of the languages with 10,000 or more speakers have positive attitude toward their languages, but there are languages with smaller number of speakers with very positive attitude toward their own language. So, that number is what we could count as the realistic final number of the language editions of Wikimedia projects. At the moment, we have less than 300 language editions. * * * There is the question: Why should we do that? The answer is clear to me: Because we can. Yes, there are maybe more specific organizations which could do that, but it's not about expertise, but about ability. Fortunately, we don't need to search for historical examples for comparisons; the Internet is good enough. I still remember infographic of the time while all of us thought that Flickr is the place for images. It turned out that the biggest repository of images is actually Facebook, which had hundred times more of them than the Twitpic at the second place, which, in turn, had hundred times more of images than Flickr. In other words, the purpose of something and general perception of its purpose is not enough for doing good job. As well as comparisons between mismanaged internet projects and mismanaged traditional scientific and educational organizations are numerous. At this point of time Wikimedia all necessary capacities -- and even a will to take that job. So, we should start doing that, finally :) * * * There is also the question: How can we do that? In short, because of Wikipedia. I announced Microgrants project of Wikimedia Serbia yesterday. To be honest, we have very low expectations. When I said to Filip that I want to have 10 active community members after the project, he said that I am overambitious. Yes, I am. But ten hours later I've got the first response and I was very positively surprised by a lot of things. The most relevant for this story is that a person from a city in Serbia proper is very enthusiastic about Wikipedia and contributing to it (and organizing contributors in the area). I didn't hear that for years! (Maybe I was just too pessimistic because of my obsession with statistics.) Keeping in mind her position (she said that she was always complaining about lack of material on Serbian Wikipedia, although at this point of time it's the encyclopedia in Serbian with the most relevant content) and her enthusiasm, I am completely sure that many speakers of many small languages are dreaming from time to time to have Wikipedia in their native language. Like in the case of a Serbian from the fifth or sixth largest city in Serbia, I am sure that they just don't know how to do that. So, it's up to us to reach them. English Wikipedia has some influences on contemporary English language (citation needed, let's say). It has more influences on languages with smaller number of speakers, like Serbian is (Cyrillic/Latin cultural war in Serbia was over at the moment when Serbian Wikipedia implemented transliteration engine; it's no issue now, while it was the issue up to mid 2000s). But it's about well developed languages in the cultural sense. What about not that developed ones? While I don't have an example of the effects (anyone, please?), counting the amount of the written materials in some languages, Wikipedia will (or already has) become the biggest book, sometimes the biggest library in that language; in some cases Wikipedia will create the majority of texts written in particular language! While we think about Wikipedia as valuable resource for learning about wide range of the topics, significance of Wikipedia for those peoples would be much higher. If we do the job, there will be many monuments to Wikipedia all over the world, because Wikipedia would preserve many cultures, not just the languages. * * * There is the question How?, at the end. There are numerous of possible ways and there are also some tries to do that, but we have to create the plan how to do that systematically, well, according to our principles and goals and according to the reality. What we know from our previous experiences: * The number of editors has declined and, at the moment, without a miracle (or hard work, but I
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
2014-04-20 6:46 GMT+03:00 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: There is the question: Why should we do that? The answer is clear to me: Because we can. You'll be hard-pressed to find a lot of people who support the general idea more than I do, but precisely because of that I believe that we must be optimistic-but-realistic. Not realistic in the sense of all is lost, and at best we can save a few dozens of languages. Realistic in the sense of we can actually save quite a lot of them, but we cannot do it by ourselves. What can we do? We have software that is very friendly to Unicode, internationalization and localization. We have rather good translation tools. We have pretty stable and accessible servers. We have a good brand. The Foundation has some money and will to spend it on focused and data-driven projects. Obviously, the only remaining problem is the motivation of the people who would write in these small languages. Small not in the number of speakers, but in the online presence. The successful projects are not successful by themselves. For the most part they are successful because these languages are successful online outside of Wikipedia. I'll be the devil's advocate and I'll argue that the Hebrew Wikipedia is successful in number of articles per speaker not so much because of the outstanding motivation of the Hebrew Wikipedia editing community, but because Hebrew was pretty successful online before Wikipedia appeared. Millions of people were writing emails and Word documents and browsing forums and news sites in Hebrew before the Wikipedia in this language started in 2003. There were Linux clubs all over Israel at that time. It was possible to read printed encyclopedias in Hebrew (these days you can easily find these multi-volume sets in the trash around here), and to get complete school and university education in it. The Hebrew Wikipedia was just a natural outgrowth of that. A successful Wikipedia in a language that doesn't have these starting condition would be an extremely rare exception. Sure, we could say that Wikipedia already succeeded at reversing things. We had astounding success at reversing the process of publishing, which was established for centuries: for us publish first, revise later is a usual thing. But can we succeed at write Wikipedia first, establish Internet culture and public education later? I'm doubtful. Publish first, revise later worked because reasonably educated people in first-world countries realized that writing is not such a big deal. They had plenty of books to read in their languages to learn how it's done. Can it work for languages in which there are hardly any modern books, or any books at all? Languages that completely rely on textbooks in foreign languages - English, French, Spanish, Russian, Indonesian? Again, I doubt. Well there even be any motivation to want to *have* an encyclopedia in a language you *speak*, when the language in which you learn in school is different? Israeli, Russian and Dutch children google for homework solutions in their languages. Indian children google for homework solutions in English. I repeatedly hear Indians complaining that learning in high school in your own language rather than in English is one of the worst things to have on your CV. A lot of chicken-and-egg here. Back to the original question: Can Wikipedia save these languages? Not by itself. Wikipedia is only a part of a language's online presence; an important part, but I'm not sure that it's natural for it to be its first part. I'd say - get these people to write emails and Facebook statuses in their languages first. It will be much easier for a Wikipedia to come after that. And please don't let this email be Stop Energy - I'd love to be proven wrong. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
First, I want to respond to the structural questions, among them some which I didn't mention: In short, we can because we have organizational infrastructure, capable to work with local people and bring them to edit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. That's not the rocket science. Working with others: Of course! We are not the body which standardize characters, neither we are an academic institution capable to describe languages. However, standardization and language description are not the actions which create content in particular language, which makes languages living. It's about writing texts in those languages. Writing encyclopedia, books etc. is about creating content. Balazs, we are not reinventing the wheel; it doesn't exist. Sounds unbelievably? It sounded to me, as well, some five years ago. Besides loose connection between linguists on Linguist list, Ethnologue is the most important global institution. And it did nothing more than translating Bible and quite bad description of the main characteristics of the languages. Everything else is scattered all over completely disconnected university departments all over the world. Our civilization is pathetic? Yes, I know. Unbelievably, but we are the only global movement capable to do that. That's where our responsibility lies. We can, others can't. == Structural issues == But we have significant structural issues which we should address: * As I mentioned above, 1 active editor for a language with 10,000 of speakers and 10 active editors for a language with 100,000 of speakers is not enough. We need to raise participation for an order of magnitude. To do that, we can't rely on Internet hype. Even if miracle happens, it is not sustainable. We have to work with real people, to go all over the places where our chapters exist and show those people how they can contribute to Wikimedia projects. * After the initial hype, which is responsible for ~200 language editions of Wikipedia, during the best years we were getting ~10 new editions. If we want to cover 3000 languages, we'll need 300 years for the job. * If we switch the number above and say that we want to get 300 new editions per year and to finish the job in 10 years, it would mean that we'll have 25 new language editions of Wikimedia projects per month on average. That's possible in relation to the field work, while quite problematic for our own inertia. If we have 25 groups -- I am not talking here about chapters, but about sub-chapter groups as well -- which have one event per month in order to create one language edition of Wikipedia (that's not one time job, but we can wait for one year to start counting this), we could have 25 new language editions per month. And we have chapters or quite organized groups in many places where language diversity is significant enough: India, Indonesia, Philippines, South Africa, Kenya, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Russia. If we have two groups per each of those countries, we can do the job. And I am not counting possibility that we could get new chapters in other linguistically diverse countries, like Thailand, Nepal and Papua New Guinea are. At the other side, it would be significant strike to our capabilities to approve those projects. We have issues at every step and it usually takes a lot of time to get one project running. == Ideas and experiences == I would like that we are talking mostly about this topic. I think that some of the problems are not real problems and that others are serious obstacles. But whatever I think, whoever detects a problem, it would be good to start thinking how to solve it. Various experiences are also important. But I would like to get them in more generalized way. * We have the problem of declining number of participants. We could deploy various methods how to overcome them. There is no one particular reason for the declining number of participants. Some of the reasons are beyond our abilities (Facebook is more fancy), some of them are structural and hard to tackle (general trend of having more academic knowledge, harder and harder for newcomers), but some of them are realistic (people who don't know that they could participate in writing encyclopedic materials). And even I would think that it's possible to work on overcoming declining participation on German Wikipedia, Hubert has shown that it's possible. I used to count on Molotov cocktails, not on heavy artillery :) Hubert, there is hint for you: Few years ago Language committee has reserved all ISO 639-6 codes [1] as possible names of Wikimedia projects (triggered by usage of ten.wikipedia.org, which is, in fact, a valid ISO 639-3 code). While nothing in particular has been discussed, there is obviously a field for some types of Wikimedia projects based on dialects. * We have chapters in the regions where a lot of languages are spoken. What about incorporating inside of the next annual plan monthly visits to
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
Interesting thoughts. I have a few brief comments, and will engage further (on Meta, perhaps) later: 0. because we can is indeed a very poor reason to do anything. We are also probably the only global network that can ensure complete coverage of all Pokémon characters in 100 languages. That's far from proof that we should allocate active investment (as distinct from volunteer choices) to this. 1. I contend our mission does not extend to language preservation via write-only encyclopedias. Language preservation is a fine a noble mission, and one I personally sympathize with a great deal. It is however not our mission. Our mission is to create and share free knowledge. 2. This does include free knowledge _about_ every last language of the world, so by all means: let us preserve all languages' written output on Wikisource, and let us document all languages' lexicons on Wiktionary (not their own Wiktionary, but active Wiktionaries with existing editing communities), but we should not unconditionally spend resources to ensure the availability of free knowledge _in_ every last language. I submit that our vision is satisfied by offering free knowledge in the languages people use to consume knowledge (a far _far_ smaller subset of even the 280-odd language editions we already have). 3. An example: some time ago, our colleagues in Chile wanted to spend (not a lot of) movement funds on printing the Welcome to Wikipedia booklet in Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui is (perhaps) spoken by fewer than 3000 people, no doubt mostly without facility with or regular access to the Internet. There is not, and there never will be, a Wikipedia that is a useful reference source in Rapa Nui. And that's okay, because there is also not, and never will be, a person on this planet who _needs_ free knowledge in Rapa Nui, that is, who cannot consume knowledge in another language (indeed, I dare wager fully 100% of Rapa Nui speakers not only _can_ consume knowledge in Spanish, but would _prefer_ to do so. In practical terms, I mean, e.g. if they needed medical information and had a page of Rapa Nui and a page of Spanish providing that information before them). 4. What does interest me, as a grantmaker, is where to draw the line between the Rapa Nui end of the spectrum and languages that, with some active promotion, could well become useful and much-needed reference sources in some cultures. In other words, *what are the prerequisites for a viable Wikipedia in a given language?* At least good odds for one. Instinctively, I think those prerequisites would be some combination of: - number of literate speakers with Internet access (audience) - number of literate speakers with Internet access, education, and spare time (prospective editors) - availability of secondary sources in that language - availability of news sources in that language - reasonable way to type the language into a computer Of these, only the last one is something we can do something about (and indeed have been doing). I would welcome some thinking from all interested, including the Language Committee, on what might a reasonable set of criteria be for a language we would consider it reasonable to promote a _Wikipedia_ in. Asaf On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 1:28 AM, Hubert Laska hubert.la...@gmx.at wrote: Hi Milos, at the same time when you are concerned about the collection / preservation of thousands of languages, I will briefly introduce a project that currently takes place in Austria together with the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This project has the same goal direction, which you mention, even if we might go another way. Our way is at first the acquisition of languages, micro languages, language varieties and dialects. The basis of this work it will be, by a software (which has yet to be made ) to capture the regional characteristics of the language. written as a word, as a phrase, and then of course the regional peculiarities in pronunciation, using and producing audio files. Subsequently, there will be regional wikis to bring on a simple level, people to represent their knowledge. This is important especially in the german Wikipedia, because now it is almost impossible to enter de:WP as a freshman. The claims are completely covered, we lose an enormous number of authors and win hardly newones. In the meantime, it is already partially so that even the articles are no longer readable because they just follow an off-hook academic claim, not the demands of most of our readers. You are speaking about languages, Milos , of which you accept that it is as a official standard language with an appropriate written version. Here you will (and we will) encounter the first boundaries. The most important part for me of your writing is that you're worried about the fact that we constantly lose authors. So you're absolutely right. In our projects we often ignore the fact that knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of the educated class alone, we
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 1:15 AM, Asaf Bartov abar...@wikimedia.org wrote: 0. because we can is indeed a very poor reason to do anything. We are also probably the only global network that can ensure complete coverage of all Pokémon characters in 100 languages. That's far from proof that we should allocate active investment (as distinct from volunteer choices) to this. It's easy to miss historical responsibility which one person or group have. We are living in the present and we often don't realize how important is what we are doing at the moment. For few years we already did one historical job, which is about the biggest encyclopedia in the history of humankind. There is no software piece, no image of a monument or a beauty of nature (or numerous things which we are doing at the moment) comparable to the fact that we can preserve not just languages, but many cultures. I know that it's not precisely in our mission, but if we leave the strict interpretation of our mission, it could pass. There is no one else to do that and there is no time to wait for another global movement to do that. I am not saying that we should start doing things indiscriminately and move the focus from the free knowledge to the language preservation. I agree that we should cover first those languages with the most chances to survive (among them, those with the most chances to have significant contribution to Wikimedia projects). The point is that if we don't do that, nobody will. And that's not because nobody in the future won't be willing to do that, but because there are maybe ~50 years to do the job. That's not a lot. Wikipedia is 13 years old and 50 years is around for times more than that. We are simply living in one specific period and our size and focus are giving us specific kind of responsibility. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 1:15 AM, Asaf Bartov abar...@wikimedia.org wrote: 4. What does interest me, as a grantmaker, is where to draw the line between the Rapa Nui end of the spectrum and languages that, with some active promotion, could well become useful and much-needed reference sources in some cultures. In other words, *what are the prerequisites for a viable Wikipedia in a given language?* At least good odds for one. Instinctively, I think those prerequisites would be some combination of: - number of literate speakers with Internet access (audience) - number of literate speakers with Internet access, education, and spare time (prospective editors) - availability of secondary sources in that language - availability of news sources in that language - reasonable way to type the language into a computer After a general response about can, here is more practical one. I have pretty good clue about what's reasonable to do and what's not. For my presentation in Haifa I did quite good work in data mining Ethnologue's database. During this week I'll familiarize with what I did previously and start to organize data. (Likely on a wiki which I'll create for myself, but the data could be easily transferred to Meta or any other Wikimedia project when we realize where the home of such project would be in the future; also, organizational work and discussion should take place on Meta, of course; also, should check relevant existing pages.) Basically, there are few groups which should be our focus: * Languages with more than 10,000 of speakers with positive attitude toward language and accessible electricity. (If there is electricity, some internet exists.) * Smaller languages with highly positive attitude among speakers. Although I am quite skeptical about languages below around 10,000 speakers, there are non-moribund languages with much less speakers. Electricity also counts. * Smaller languages inside of OECD countries. That could be about regional languages (continental continuum of Germanic languages is the most important example), but I am mostly thinking about native languages of countries like Australia and Canada are, as well as about remains of colonies of France, UK, Netherlands and US. Here we could get strong support from particular governments (like it's in WM FR case). The purpose of this brain storming is also to create targets. I don't think that WM ID should go into a random part of West Papua and try to make contact with native people. There are languages with more than one million of speakers without Wikipedia and those people live in areas with electricity and internet access. (From what I remember, the largest language has more than 10 millions of speakers, but Indian government treats it as a part of Hindi.) We'll need months or even a year to prepare things in the right way. We can create targets based on Ethnologue data, but their data are not that reliable. It should be checked... And then we could list the targets for the chapters. I wouldn't say that lack of sources or newspapers in particular should stop us from doing the job. I wouldn't say that lack of orthography should stop us, neither. We should list the obstacles and if we are not capable to do something alone, we should call other organizations to help us. It could be about resources -- including money --, it could be about expertise. If particular group has strong positive attitude toward their native language and they have technological minimums to work on Wikipedia, we should do our best to help them. I am also talking here not about Wikipedia as the necessary first project. Having good Rapa Nui dictionary on English Wiktionary is quite good solution for that case. Which, in turn, reminds me that we should adopt OmegaWiki. And, finally, I have to say that I really appreciate your input because of realistic approach. I do think that it's more possible than you think, but it's always good to have someone who is a bit more skeptical :) ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] How Wikimedia could help languages to survive
There are ~6000 languages in the world and around 3000 of them have more than 10,000 speakers. That approximation has some issues, but they are compensated by the ambiguity of the opposition. Ethnologue is not the best place to find precise data about the languages and it could count as languages just close varieties of one language, but it also doesn't count some other languages. Not all of the languages with 10,000 or more speakers have positive attitude toward their languages, but there are languages with smaller number of speakers with very positive attitude toward their own language. So, that number is what we could count as the realistic final number of the language editions of Wikimedia projects. At the moment, we have less than 300 language editions. * * * There is the question: Why should we do that? The answer is clear to me: Because we can. Yes, there are maybe more specific organizations which could do that, but it's not about expertise, but about ability. Fortunately, we don't need to search for historical examples for comparisons; the Internet is good enough. I still remember infographic of the time while all of us thought that Flickr is the place for images. It turned out that the biggest repository of images is actually Facebook, which had hundred times more of them than the Twitpic at the second place, which, in turn, had hundred times more of images than Flickr. In other words, the purpose of something and general perception of its purpose is not enough for doing good job. As well as comparisons between mismanaged internet projects and mismanaged traditional scientific and educational organizations are numerous. At this point of time Wikimedia all necessary capacities -- and even a will to take that job. So, we should start doing that, finally :) * * * There is also the question: How can we do that? In short, because of Wikipedia. I announced Microgrants project of Wikimedia Serbia yesterday. To be honest, we have very low expectations. When I said to Filip that I want to have 10 active community members after the project, he said that I am overambitious. Yes, I am. But ten hours later I've got the first response and I was very positively surprised by a lot of things. The most relevant for this story is that a person from a city in Serbia proper is very enthusiastic about Wikipedia and contributing to it (and organizing contributors in the area). I didn't hear that for years! (Maybe I was just too pessimistic because of my obsession with statistics.) Keeping in mind her position (she said that she was always complaining about lack of material on Serbian Wikipedia, although at this point of time it's the encyclopedia in Serbian with the most relevant content) and her enthusiasm, I am completely sure that many speakers of many small languages are dreaming from time to time to have Wikipedia in their native language. Like in the case of a Serbian from the fifth or sixth largest city in Serbia, I am sure that they just don't know how to do that. So, it's up to us to reach them. English Wikipedia has some influences on contemporary English language (citation needed, let's say). It has more influences on languages with smaller number of speakers, like Serbian is (Cyrillic/Latin cultural war in Serbia was over at the moment when Serbian Wikipedia implemented transliteration engine; it's no issue now, while it was the issue up to mid 2000s). But it's about well developed languages in the cultural sense. What about not that developed ones? While I don't have an example of the effects (anyone, please?), counting the amount of the written materials in some languages, Wikipedia will (or already has) become the biggest book, sometimes the biggest library in that language; in some cases Wikipedia will create the majority of texts written in particular language! While we think about Wikipedia as valuable resource for learning about wide range of the topics, significance of Wikipedia for those peoples would be much higher. If we do the job, there will be many monuments to Wikipedia all over the world, because Wikipedia would preserve many cultures, not just the languages. * * * There is the question How?, at the end. There are numerous of possible ways and there are also some tries to do that, but we have to create the plan how to do that systematically, well, according to our principles and goals and according to the reality. What we know from our previous experiences: * The number of editors has declined and, at the moment, without a miracle (or hard work, but I assume the most of our movement is used to miracles, not to hard work), the trend will continue. Contrary to that, number of readers has increased. Unfortunately, in this case a miracle is not necessary for that trend to end. * If we count languages with relevant statistics for editors per million, the top of them belong either to the highly motivated communities (Hebrew), either to the rich countries with harsh climate,
