[Foundation-l] Native Cherokee Langage XML Dumps posted for 20060702 Wikipedia

Tue Jul 4 08:07:15 UTC 2006

Mathias Schindler wrote:

>On 7/4/06, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>The Native Cherokee Language Translation Project has posted XML dumps
>>against enwiki 07-02-2006 at
>>    
>>
>
>Hi Jeffrey,
>
>thanks for all your efforts here but I honestly fail to see the
>connection to Wikimedia Foundation related matters. 
>
result |= (Wikipedia == Wikimedia);

>You might find more
>people interested in this on a Native Cherokee mailing list. 
>
You mean I might find people who can read Cherokee.

>As the data
>is a machine translation from enwiki, the related mailing list might
>also be slightly more relevant to you posting.
>
I can certainly post there, and to be honest, I have not seen much 
traffic on this list
and aside from folks asking for handouts from the Foundation, I haven't 
seen much
in the way of useful dialouge on this list, with the exception of Danny, 
Brad, and Mr.
Wales, so your suggestion of another list is certainly welcome.

>As you brought up the topic anyway, I would also suggest to stop calling
>the pages at http://www.wikigadugi.org/ a "Wikipedia". It might be a
>wiki based encyclopedia. However, this project is currently not part of
>the Wikipedia (which could be debated, nontheless).
>
>  
>
Since Wikipedia has only 50 articles in Cherokee at chr.wikipedia.org, 
and the translations are not only
wrong (University Students "Guessing" at word contruction), but terrible 
in quality,
The only Cherokee Wikipedia (substantive one) is this one. Using the
Wikimedia Foundation name is one thing, which I have not done, but 
calling Wikipedia's Content (which I did not alter other than
to translate) as "Wikipedia" is following the GFDL attribution 
requirements since I cannot possibly
name all of the authors. This is particularly true since Wikimedia 
publishes XML dumps with Wikipedia
references in not less than 774,231 places in the last dump alone and 
with embedded icon logic in the dumps
to create links back to Wikipedia. If Wikimedia does not wants its dumps 
used "as is" it should remove these
Wikipedia references from theXML dumps.

 From what I understand, Wikimedia's mission is to promote its content 
for education and human enrichment.
Translating to Cherokee and creating textbooks seems to fit this model, 
particularly since the content is being
targeted for our education programs. There are only 232,000 of my people 
and of these only 5,000 are fluent
native speakers. This means our "community" which is the community I 
serve, needs Wikipedia's entire content
for our programs and needs translations. I am unaware of any other 
Native American Laguage Program involving
Wikipedia which has gotten this far. I have replicated Wikipedia in 
English, Syllabary, and Phonetics -- without
anyones help.

Mr. Wales has stated he wishes the Cherokee People to write with their 
own voice, unfortunately, the older TTY Cherokee
fonts do not map to the syllabary, so no one on any computer can edit 
Cherokee on Wales site unless they feel like typing
in &XXXX format and trying to make sense of it. There are no editors for 
non syllabary. My site allows
phonetic editng and the programs will convert to syllabary. There's 
another problem with the Otali dialect no longer
mapping to the syllabary, so Wales Cherokee site is basically worthless 
to our folks as a remote repository. That's why
the project has failed to date.

I have reviewed who you are and your role here, and I appreciate you 
taking the time to address these issues. I am certainly
willing to listen to input and clarification, but I am not interested in 
turf wars over who controls Wikipedia or Wikimedia. I am
here to complete an important task -- that's all.

Jeff

>Thanks and Greetings,
>Mathias
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>  
>