[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

Thu Dec 27 22:08:53 UTC 2007

On 12/27/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Nathan wrote:
> > I think that preserving a language is a good goal, but it is one that
> > Wikipedia is not well suited for and is not intended to fulfill.
> > Creating an automatically translated article on every city and town in
> > the US is not a way to 'preserve' a constructed or dead language. If
> > the point is to aggregate knowledge in a way that is accessible to as
> > many people as possible, how does a Wikipedia in a constructed
> > language (a code, really) serve that point?
> While Wikipedia, where we have original writing, is not best suited to
> these small languages, the same is not the case for some sister
> projects, notabnly Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikisource.  Constructed
> languages need to be viewed differently from dead or endangered
> languages, because most of them need to have a culture constructed as
> well as a language.

Sources in other languages are valid sources. This means that a small
language Wikipedia may be completely based on sources written in other
language.

And bot-generated articles are the best example of doing so because
they *are* based on valid sources.