[Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request, and Chinese Wikipedia again

Sun Feb 20 11:03:18 UTC 2005

Sheng Jiong wrote:

>Same thing with Singlish. People love using Singlish in BBS, but you
>get an immediate F if you write your thesis in Singlish. So should we
>have a Singlish Wikipedia?
>  
>
I see no particular reason not to, if it's the case (which I don't know) 
that a significant number of people communicate largely in Singlish and 
find it more natural than "standard English".  We already have a 
ht.wikipedia.org for the Haitian creole, which is basically a French 
dialect with significant influences from a number of African languages.  
For a long time it was considered basically "improper French", and 
people spoke it but didn't write it---indeed, writing in it would earn 
you an F on your essay in school.  More recently, that's been recognized 
as a sort of cultural elitism, and it's becoming recognized as an 
acceptable language to write in, and in fact the standard language of Haiti.

It might be worth pointing out that "standard English" for Wikipedia's 
purposes is itself already different from what your English teacher 
might say is standard.  We tend to avoid (for the most part) not only 
local dialects that are "improper" but also avoid "proper English" that 
is not commonly used, or is only used in some regions of the world.

This is in some sense basically the [[en:Prescription and description]] 
debate.  Should we be enforcing handed-down rules of "correct language", 
whatever that might mean, or should we merely be documenting language as 
it is actually used by real people?

(Of course, whether written Cantonese and Singlish are used by many 
people or not is another issue.  I'm just arguing that the fact that the 
Chinese and Singaporean governments dislike them and consider them 
"improper" shouldn't be the deciding factor.)

-Mark