[Foundation-l] Languages and Communities

Tue Aug 30 07:27:14 UTC 2005

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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