I think there are still many questions open and that's why I write this
mail also to the lists and do not only add it to the page on meta:
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Languages and Communities
Now I read a consideration about languages and communities in Ultimate
Wiktionary that states that people who cannot speak English can't be
part of the community.
My answer to that is: no, that's not true and I will explain why below.
Then there is that other statement that it is better to have separate
language communities so that they can speak in their own language and
everyone can participate. And of course that the aim is to have a lot of
international co-operation in cross-languages and being more practical
this is normally English.
Well: this would be desirable, but it is not happening within the
Wiktionary projects – most wiktionaries really don't know what the
others do and besides very few ones there's not even much information
coming through the wiktionary-l.
Well, let's se how communication and communities work within UW.
There will be beer parlours for every language people want to have one
in. There will be people who care about communication issues (mainly
Sysops I suppose, but also other people). Now there are those local
communities talking about everyday issues and then a very important
theme comes along and it is really important to have it in all the other
beer parlours as well. So writing for example only in Italian what does
this person do? He/she writes a message and below the title there's the
message "please distribute to the other beer parlours". Normally people
caring about communications read all in "their beer parlour" and so the
one who knows both languages takes the message and transfers it for
example to the English beer parlour and adds a link to the English
message (really this can be done with the help of a template) and this
way also all the others will know about this. Now what is different to
the actual projects: these communications simply do not exist (or hardly
do exist) – it is not an automatic procedure that can involve all the
Wiktionary communities, but only for those who by chance read this/that
post. Like in all huge networks also in Wiktionary we will have local
groups and I suppose that there will be also groups that for example
focus on certain themes (like etymology, pronunciation and soundfiles,
pictures or whatever). And there will very likely the "translator-beer
parlours" since they use UW for work, they have other requirements than
most users – there will be discussions on terminology, on which term
suits best in which context etc. just like it now happens in so many
mailing lists. Many of these people are not too computer literate and so
they will come over step by step and they will need quite a lot of more
technical information. Of course anyone can contribute to any community
in whatever language he/she likes.
So it cannot be said that people who do not speak English cannot have
their community – they will have it for sure, as it is the only way to
go. English will like so often be a kind of a interface language as I
suppose it is hard to find someone who can translate from Italian to
Chinese directly or the other way round. So the Chinese beer parlour
will receive its news very likely from the English one.
For many minor languages where it actually does not make sense to open a
whole wiktionary since the language speakers are just a few – maybe only
500 or even less can have their place as well. This is not even an
option now – but within UW even this will be possible.
Think about all that African languages where probably universities will
be the first to co-operate. Well also considering the Logos contents: we
can have material in very seldom languages from the very first beginning
and so in particular this very small groups of native speakers will have
something where they can start to work on, about which they can
communicate and discuss – hopefully in their own language. It is much
easier to integrate people for new languages if there is already
something there where they can work on than having to start from scratch.
So that about communities: no fear is needed that there aren't going to
be local communities – they will surely be there, because people need it
and interlanguage communication will be for sure better.
I would even love to see local offline meetings where people that do not
actually contribute to the Wikimedia projects are invited.
************
Ciao, Sabine
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