Hello,
I feel that I need a clarification on wikipedia policies related to hobby wikipedias.
Consider the case of the Moldovan language. The Moldovan wikipedia has been created and administered by Mark Williamson, which does not speak the language correctly. He copied (and replaced the latin script with cyrillic) a lot articles from ro.wiki, just to create what looks like a viable wikipedia. I presume exotic languages are a hobby for him, I have no problem with this. Even originality is not a problem, given that the purpose of wiki is to inform.
However, the Moldovan language is not extinct, so the oppinion of native speakers should count. The problem being that no Moldovan-speaking wikipedia user supports Mark Williamson. And when I say no user, I really mean that there is none. Actually, most Moldovan users dislike the existence of this wiki, because the Moldovan language is actually a creation of the Soviet authorities. To support this affirmation, note that there is no registered Moldovan user on en.wiki, meta.wiki, and not even mo.wiki. :)
So, given that this hobby wikipedia actually hurts the very people it was intended to help, is it normal that it remains online? I remind you once more that no actual Moldovan supports it. By Moldovan speaker I mean a person able to
write Moldovan correctly.
I mean, if wikipedia policy is to grant users hobby wikipedias, Mark should get his, but maybe not using the official ISO code.
Yours,
Dpotop
PS: I am sorry for bugging you with this, but some things discussed here must be clearly said.
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Hi,
I'm planning to work on a number of articles related to Irish, Scottish and
Welsh localities on the Romanian Wikipedia. I am currently in a dilemma as
to what name to use - the Celtic variant or the English variant. I have
realised that most non-English Wikipedias use the English variant - so that
place names such as "Cork", "Dublin", "Edinburg" and "Cardiff" are used. For
the exception of Dublin, perhaps, many of these place names, particularly
smaller towns, do not have native variants in languages such as Romanian,
German, French, etc.
So, why should the English name be used in this situation? Wouldn't the
Celtic name be more appropriate? Celtic languages are co-official in
Scotland and Wales, while in Ireland, Irish is the first official and
national language. Due to this, I would prefer to use placenames such as
"Corcaigh", "*An Uaimh*" (for Navan), "*Chill Dara" *(for Kildare), etc.
However, this sounds quite odd and are not frequently used, even though they
are the first official name. What do others think? I am inclined to use them
so that people are actually educated that there exists an Irish language as
the first official language of Ireland. Too often, people in Romania say
"the Irish speak (just) English" and stop it at that. They're surprised, for
example, when I tell them about Irish names such as "Baile Atha Cliath" for
Dublin, etc.
Thanks,
Ronline
It seems that a lot of people from different Wikipedias are reading this
list, and my post is about internationalisation of Wikipedia, so I decided I
will try to bring a certain tool to your attention. It’s the
Interwiki-Link-Checker
(http://tools.wikimedia.de/~flacus/IWLC/start.php) by de:user:Flacus, a
brilliant tool which has facilitated the generation of >100.000
Interlanguage-Links within the last six month.
As you might know, there are still lots of articles in one Wikipedia which
have the same name as articles in aWikipedia of another language, but are
*not* linked by an Interlanguage-Link (e.g. en-de: ~6300 articles, sv-fr:
~2300 articles and
nl-pl ~1400 articles, as of the dumps from February 2006).
This articles have been listed for a lot of language combinations by
de:user:SirJective. But not all articles with identical names are about
the same subject, so human work is needed to decide whether an
Interwiki-Link can be automatically inserted by a bot. In order to make
this decision easy and comfortable, there is a brilliant tool called
Interwiki-Link-Checker written by de:Benutzer:Flacus.
You might want to check the FAQ at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Flacus/Wikipedia_Interwiki-Link-Check…
or just try it at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~flacus/IWLC/start.php
Thanks for your time and (maybe even) help, I can just invite you to try
the tool, it's fun and you're reading (and editing) quite a lot of stuff
you wouldn't stumble upon otherwise.
If you do like the tool and want to spread the word, visit
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Flacus/Wikipedia_Interwiki-Link-Check…,
help and new ideas are welcome.
Cheers, de:Benutzer:Mdangers
--
Echte DSL-Flatrate dauerhaft f�r 0,- Euro*!
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Since there was not so much media activities, I didn't send report every
week.
12. February 2006.
- The article about Rancic Milosh's visit to Zagreb was published on the
site seecult.org
- The article about Rancic Milosh's visit to MAMA (Zagreb) was published on
the site of daily Danas
14. February 2006.
-Milos Rancic speaked in the program called Digital icons, on the second
channel of Belgrade radio.
16. February 2006
-Milosh Rancic had an interview for the radio B92. It will be broadcasted on
18th or 19th February
18. February 2006.
-Wikipedia was shown up as the main news on the National television website,
at the part called "intersting".
3. March 2006.
-Cultural portal of the southeastern Europe, SEECULT.org published article
about WIkipedia at the part called "intersting".
Jovana Milicevic
Wikimedia Serbia and Montenegro
Last January 14 and 15 I sent two msg to this group
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-January/043424.html
and
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-January/043428.html),
asking for the creation of a Wikipedia in Tetum language, one of the two
official languages of Timor-Leste (or East Timor), the youngest independent
nation in the world (the other official language is Portuguese).
In the meantime, this project got 15 supporters, 8 of them native-speakers
of Tetum (see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Approved_requests_for_new_languages#Tetum_.28
15_support_.5B8_native_speakers.5D.29).
Subsequently, I created a test page
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/tet) that presently has a dozen
articles in Tetum and a few others in the process of being translated to
Tetum.
Anyway, I find it difficult to attract Tetum-speaking people to work in a
Wikipedia that is still in a test phase. So, I wonder if any developer can
inform me if this new language version of Wikipedia is about to the set up
or not.
I'm absolutely convinced the Wikipedia in Tetum is viable, and that it can
be an exceptional tool for East-Timorese to promote their national language
internally and abroad. And I'm not alone in this feeling. Giuseppe d'Angelo
said in a subsequent msg: "One can't understate what such a venture [the
creation of a Wikipedia in Tetum] would do to the self-esteem of a whole
people. It will take a while to get going, given their problems with basic
infrastructure, but I am certain that it would eventually succeed. There is
also likely to be a thriving community of Tetum speakers in nearby Darwin,
where they are likely to have better infrastructure - it's just a case of
getting the message through to them."
I will do my best to get the message to the East-Timorese in Australia, in
Portugal, in Indonesia, etc. -- as well as in East Timor. But, first of all,
you [the developers] gotta set up this new Wikipedia.
Plz let me know where are we standing of this.
Thanks & regards,
Manuel de Sousa
Hello everyone,
First of all: Don't worry -- this is my one and only posting on this topic.
The vote, while being clear in itself, has some VERY troublesome
aspects to it. And it doesn't seem to address what ought to be the
primary concern, namely to provide information to those
Moldovan-speakers who read Cyrillic script better than Latin script.
With the risk of being called names by some (please don't), I make
the following honest proposal:
1) Let the Moldovan Cyrillic Wikipedia be locked *but accessible* for now.
2) Install a Latin--Cyrillic converter similar to the one on SR:WP on
RO:WP. It does NOT need to be perfect, but it should render the text
REASONABLY intelligible in Cyrillic. It also (at least for now) needs
to work only from Latin to Cyrillic, since the editors seem to work
almost exclusively in Latin script.
3) Make a little snippet on the main page of :ro: to note that one
can view this WP in Cyrillic for the benefit of people in
Transdnistria and whoever else might prefer viewing the contents in Cyrillic.
4) Then -- and ONLY then --, archive the Cyrillic version and make it
an automatic redirect to :ro:.
This will *respect the decision* made in the vote, while it also
takes care of an important aspect which was left out of the process
-- namely, making the information available to ALL
Romanian-/Moldavian-speakers -- and especially those who may need
such information the most...
Respectfully,
Olve Utne
(from the admin team on Nynorsk Wikipedia)
Hi I'm following with interest the discussion on this topic as admin in
Friulian wikipedia. I think it would be useful to add things like the
countries of the worlds or the planets, since these may attract the
attention of new contributors. About villages, we had actually already
begun a project to insert Friulian communes in the wikipedia; we already
have a list which links Friulian and Italian names, but we didn't have a
bot to actually do the work
(http://fur.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichipedie:Progjet_comuns).
Since someone also mentioned Unicode CLDR, I'm adding in this period
data for Friulian, therefore I guess that when it will be ready these
informations could be used also in Wikipedia
Regards
Klenje
Maybe this should go on Meta, but I want to see comments here, first.
As I can see, there are two ways of mass content adding. The first one
includes generation of articles based on some public data (for example
NASA, National Geospatial Inteligence Agency, French government etc.)
Now, this is almost usual way for mass content adding and I think that
a number of us have some experience with such work.
The other way is adding content using English Wikipedia. English
Wikipedia has a lot of categorized articles, a lot of templates etc.
All these typical forms can be used for automatic content creation on
small Wikipedias.
I think that idea of having a thousends of articles with a couple of
sentences and good categorization about a lot of fields -- can be very
helpful not only to small Wikipedias, but also for spreading free
knowledge. I think that it would be a great day for us when people
which native language is Mongolian will be able to read about places
in Amazon and movies from Australia in their native language. And,
this is possible to do much faster then we think.
And not only that: bots should be able to update information; bots
should be able to do more things through time. Finally, it would be
possible to start with knowledge transfer between Wikipedias in
different languages: if we have the same methodology on different
Wikipedias, we would be able to update data semi-automatic (up to full
automatic).
However, this needs a number of people who are interested in such project:
(1) We would need people who know to work with bots (pywikipediabot or
something similar).
(2) We would need make software based on the bot core which would have
to be localized: like MediaWiki should be localized; this software
should have sentences like "<movie> is movie made in <year> in
<country>. Genre of that movie is <genre>. Director was <director>..."
in a number of languages.
(3) We would need good and quality work on English Wikipedia. Rules
like "this goes to the table, that goes to the template up, this goes
to template in the middle" should be more or less strict (but, I see
that people are working in such way on en:).
This is RFC. I am looking for your comments.
Hi Ronline,
I, personally, would go with the Celtic names, especially in Ireland where
they are now mostly "official" over the English versions, and then redirect
the English version of the name in. This is not the consensus on :en
though, I'm sad to say.
Cheers,
- Lankiveil [[:ga:Úsáideoir:Lankiveil]]
-------------------
Craig Franklin
PO Box 764
Ashgrove, Q, 4060
Australia
http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
and Culture.
----- Original Message -----
> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:21:48 +1100
> From: "Wikipedia Romania (Ronline)" <rowikipedia(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] What variant to use for Irish, Scottish and
> Welsh localities?
> To: wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:
> <648f108b0603100121k2d9e159fw19f370215b94b095(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm planning to work on a number of articles related to Irish, Scottish
and
> Welsh localities on the Romanian Wikipedia. I am currently in a dilemma as
> to what name to use - the Celtic variant or the English variant. I have
> realised that most non-English Wikipedias use the English variant - so
that
> place names such as "Cork", "Dublin", "Edinburg" and "Cardiff" are used.
For
> the exception of Dublin, perhaps, many of these place names, particularly
> smaller towns, do not have native variants in languages such as Romanian,
> German, French, etc.
>
> So, why should the English name be used in this situation? Wouldn't the
> Celtic name be more appropriate? Celtic languages are co-official in
> Scotland and Wales, while in Ireland, Irish is the first official and
> national language. Due to this, I would prefer to use placenames such as
> "Corcaigh", "*An Uaimh*" (for Navan), "*Chill Dara" *(for Kildare), etc.
> However, this sounds quite odd and are not frequently used, even though
they
> are the first official name. What do others think? I am inclined to use
them
> so that people are actually educated that there exists an Irish language
as
> the first official language of Ireland. Too often, people in Romania say
> "the Irish speak (just) English" and stop it at that. They're surprised,
for
> example, when I tell them about Irish names such as "Baile Atha Cliath"
for
> Dublin, etc.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ronline
>
There's a two-day symposium on mass digitization of literature
going on right now at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Publisher Tim O'Reilly is giving a keynote speech called "Reading
2.0" at this very moment. It's a live webcast. Two minutes into
his speech, he has already shown Wikipedia as the future of the
encyclopedia. Adam Smith from Google will speak at 5 pm EST.
Schedule, http://lib.umich.edu/mdp/symposium/schedule.html
Webcast, http://lib.umich.edu/mdp/symposium/webcast.html
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se