Kaixo!
On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 06:24:44PM -0800, Felix Wan wrote:
Mark, once again I appreciate your support. I
don't think we will get
the blessing of the community to start a Cantonese Wikipedia soon, but
it does not mean that it cannot be done later.
My advice will be that you (or someone else interested in a Cantonese
wikipedia) just get the mediawiki software and install it on a server
somewhere to try out, so it can be seen if the project is viable or not;
if it is, then moving it to wikipedia servers would be no problem, if it
is not, at least we will know.
That is how Min-nan and Walloon wikipedias started; for the Walloon one,
I wasn't myself sure it would work or not, that was actually the reason
why I tried it on my own machine first; and I had almost given up after
2-3 months, when someone else appeared and revived it.
When there were some 1.000 articles moving it to wikipedia was no
problem (even in the extreme case were the database couldn't be
imported, copying the articles by hand wouldn't be an impossible task
either).
Yes, the Walloon wikipedia is still small, and will continue to be
small, as the total population of speakers is small (about 600.000)
and there is absolutely no official support for the language nor
any presence on mass media; however, with some 1.000 articles a year it
is a valuable source of information, particularly about Walloon and
Wallonia related topics (articles about language grammar, personalities,
villages, rivers, existing and past litterature, etc), and the number of
users is still growing, slowly, but growing, which means there is
interest in it.
What I mean is, for a first try, when only limited traffic will happen,
even hosting it on a private adsl connection is enough, a small computer
with a standard GNU/Linux distribution is able to run the software;
so while there is need of somme consensus and approval to be hosted
by the wikimedia foundation and use its infrastructure; anybody
can start its own wikipedia-like server at home.
And then, depending on the results, an official merging with wikipedia
could be asked.
--
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga
http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]