For what it's worth, this is something I thought about a lot during my time involved with WMAU.
I don't think an Indigenous language Wikipedia is going to be viable in the short term. Collard cites Maori and Welsh as examples of situations where a language has been successfully "revived", and both languages have reasonably active Wikipediae. But both, even during their darkest days, had tens of thousands of fluent speakers keeping things alive. Noongar, according to the press release, has less than 300. There are simply not the numbers of fluent speakers available to form a cohesive and active Wikipedia community for the sustained period of time that would be needed to produce something useful. Not that I don't think producing an encyclopaedia in the Noongar language is anything but a laudable and worthy idea, but I don't think that the Wikipedia model is one that is likely to bear fruit in this particular circumstance. On a more practical note, to create a new language edition of Wikipedia there are quite a few hoops to jump through, including the requirement to build a test edition on the Incubator with a viable community, which is quite a high hurdle to jump over. Cheers, Craig Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2014 11:19:50 +1100 > From: Charles Gregory <[email protected]> > To: Wikimedia Australia Chapter <[email protected]> > Subject: [Wikimediaau-l] Creation of Noongar (Aboriginal) Wikipedia > Message-ID: > <CADBtOrnpR3u1U92Sa46Kp-= > [email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > > http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201402116439/arts-and-culture/new-media-throw-lifeline-ancient-language > > Has anyone seen this? Does it refer to a new website or a language version > of Wikipedia? (Wikipedia doesn't appear to be mentioned in the article but > I found it from this tweet - > https://twitter.com/IndigenousTweet/status/433230348801961985 ) > > Regards, > > Charles > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: < > http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaau-l/attachments/20140308/9647bbd8/attachment-0001.html > > > >
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