[Foundation-l] Re: A proposal for new language creation

Fri Nov 25 06:57:04 UTC 2005

Joanot Martorell wrote:

>2005/11/22, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>:
>  
>
>>2.  To discourage the creation of new Wikipedia editions in dialects
>>which do not significantly differ from existing Wikipedias.  We want to
>>keep from being hoaxed, and from falling into political traps.
>>
>>For dialects, then, we want to require a much higher threshold before
>>allowing the wikipedia -- we need a good reason to start it.  A
>>"Bavarian" Wikipedia proposal would need a much much stronger rationale
>>before we start it than "German".  Obviously.
>>    
>>
>This point isn't enough to clarify when whe should or should not create a new
>dialect wikipedia, because it's using the unique criteria of interlegibility.
>By exemple, Catalan (my native lang) and Occitan are mutually interlegible in
>text written, or between Neapolitan and Italian. And for some persons
>Portuguese and Spanish are interlegible too, but they are considered as
>independent languages. I think that perhaps the point to consider the inclusion
>of a new dialect wikipedia would be better moving around the
>exclusionist-inclusionist poles.
>  
>
I don't think we're talking about an interlegibility criterion here, at 
least that's not how I understand Jimbo's proposal. Certainly nobody 
objects to separate wikis for the Scandinavian languages. The issue is 
not whether native speakers of one language can read material in another 
language. It's whether there are native speakers who actually read and 
write in this as a literary language at all, as opposed to reading and 
writing in some "other" language of which theirs is merely a dialect.

Expanding on Jimbo's point, here's the problem with dialect Wikipedias 
(leaving aside, for a moment, the thorny problem of deciding whether 
something is a dialect or a language). Dialects tend to be in a similar 
position to constructed languages, in that they have no pre-existing 
literature and their orthography has to be invented to a significant 
degree. When the standards these establish are missing, we really have 
no factual basis from which to write in such a language. Inventing 
spelling or grammar while you write the encyclopedia, just like 
inventing facts while you write the encyclopedia, is perpetrating an 
intellectual fraud and a hoax.

However, both dialects and constructed languages of long standing may 
develop their own literature and a more or less standard orthography, 
which would enable us to accept them as potential Wikipedia languages.

--Michael Snow