[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Status of Wikimedia (was: Status of Serbia and Montenegro chapter)

Tue Nov 8 15:37:15 UTC 2005

On 11/7/05, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> As officer of the Wikimedia Foundation I can't welcome your decision and
> would question your competence to speak for the whole of the not yet
> existing serbian Wikimedia chapter.

I think that I made clear distinction between "we" and "I", even my
words as "I" have also almost 100% support of the community / members
of the chapter which would be created in the couple of weeks. (It can
be checked, of course.)

> On 1 september I sent the following email to the board:
> [...]
> | In the last open board meeting there was a discussion about having a
> | seed wiki and a committee deciding policies for it.
> | So, here a proposal how to deal with new language requests (not new
> | projects)
> | * community elects a committee of seven people on meta-wiki (one-year
> term)
> | * requests for new languages will be submitted to the committee on
> meta-wiki
> | * committee will create a catalogue of criterias over time
> | * they examine the case (check if language or dialect, spread of
> | language, number of the people willing to work on it, consult
> | experts)
> | * they decide, three sorts of decisions are possible: accept, reject
> in general (because no real language etc.), reject in
> | this case (not enough support) but can be later again proposed if
> | conditions have changed
> | * have a developer create the wiki if approved
> |
> | This way, we can maybe get rid of these pending requests:
> | http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> [...]
> | If the committee does its job well, it could later also get the
> | competence to filter new project proposals.
> | Add your suggestions and criticisms and say yes or no.
> |
> | I'd be willing to help with the election but I don't have the time
> | for an extensive community debate and slow process on the
> | mailinglists and wikis with no decision at all after months.

I am completely for this proposal. And this is the way how to solve
this kind of problems. We can talk about details (How the community
would control this council? -- I think that members of council should
have linguistic/anthropological/ethnological/sociological education or
at least that they are introduced into linguistic/ethnological
problems very well and that they are reliable persons. -- etc.).

And I would like to see that we started to implement this proposal. A
lot of important proposals are dead only because of inactivity or a
lack of will to finish it. (I have one which is on stand by, but it is
not important as this one is [small letters at wikilinks].) So, I am
ready to help.

Do we need Bord action or we can just start with it on Meta?

> As wikipedian who dedicated myself to the creation of a high quality
> free encyclopedia in as many languages as are _needed_ to make human
> knowledge accessible to everybody, I can very well understand your feelings.

Thank you. Before your email I felt like to talk with a wall.

> What shall I tell a journalist who asks the press officer about the
> zlatiborian language wikipedia? "Eh yes, it's ridiculous, but you see, a
> few people who don't even speak this city dialect pressured the
> community into it. Cantonese? Oh yes, the same thing happened.
> Wikiversity? Ah well, sorry, we're still looking for a concept. There's
> rubbish on wikibooks like the "How to get a girl manual"? See, people
> are working on the encyclopedia, there are not enough people to look
> into the other projects and control them for quality. You found a
> copyvio on suaheli wikiquote? Sorry, I don't speak suaheli - and the
> three suaheli speakers in Wikimedia are busy with the encyclopedia. Why
> are there so many corn field related news on german Wikinews while XY
> isn't treated? Oh well, now this is a funny story...

There is big difference between new Wikipedias and articles. While
articles can be POV without marking it (I know for a lot of examples
on English Wikipedia) because it is the part of process of building
knowledge using wiki -- completely different story are (new) languages
and (new) language communities on Wikipedia.

I agree with Gerrit about "How to get a girl/boy manual". While I
didn't read this wikibook, I can say that such kind of manuals can be
very useful in emotional development of young persons and this is
"knowledge about life" and it should be free, too. (Of course, I would
like to see some psychologist to work on such manuals.

Completely other question are Wikipedias on new languages. And there
are two different cases:

1. The first case is the most often: Some language is not welcomed by
some community because of some political reason. And inside of this
case there are two sub-cases:

1.a. Language/dialect is really different then standard (or majority)
language is and there are enough people who want to work on this
Wikipedia. I think that in such cases we should not look at any
political reason which "rationally" tries to describe that it is "the
same language" etc. (In the case that Mark is right about Cantonese --
it can be the example.)

1.b. Language/dialect has very small differences with standard (or
majority) language and there are enough people who want to work on
such Wikipedia. As the classic example of such situation is my
language area, I can say that we should work very carefully on this
kind of cases. A lot of irrational feelings are inside of the
"language confrontation" and we should work carefully and slowly.

Potential ask for Montenegrin Wikipedia is the case.

If we don't have usable conversion software for such case (as we don't
have in this moment) and that there are Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and
Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, I think that Montenegrins should have their
own Wikipedia.

If we have usable conversion software (and I think that we would have
it in the next couple of months), I think that Montenegrins should:
(1) choose "a friendly Wikipedia" (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or
Serbo-Croatian), (2) to implement differences between the main
language and Montenegrin standard in the software, (3) to get the code
(for example, "cg" if it is not exist) and to have their own language
Wikipedia as the option from "a friendly Wikipedia" and as default
option from their own domain. (4) This means that Montenegrin and "a
friendly Wikipedia" would be the same one with two skins.

2. Zlatiborian is the second case. The story about it is a clear hoax
because Zlatiborian is not even a dialect, but
sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-dialect (Shtokavian->Neo-Shtokavian->Eastern
Herzegovian->Western Serbian->Zlatiborian) and there are no people who
feel like Zlatiborians in ethnic/national sense. (... bla, bla,
bla...)

Council should be the most important body in such cases. While there
are a number of Serbian Wikipedians (as well as Croatian who are well
introduced in the situation), there is reasonable possibility to find
ethnicity with a couple of millions of speakers which is not so well
known (as well as a thousands of smaller). In such cases council
should elaborate (using expert knowledge, literature, maybe even to go
to the area in the future) with the clear answer to the community is
it a hoax or not.

> ...
> If someone wondered lately why there's almost no elian anymore around in
> Wikimedia affairs, that's why.
> ...

Social relations are not easy. Especially in the large community such
Wikimedian is. I think that there are enough people who want to
improve Wikimedian projects from the roots.