[Foundation-l] What size for a minimum WP community? was: Allow new wikis in extinct languages?

Sun Apr 6 19:16:47 UTC 2008

My observation material are the Wp's in the languages of the former Soviet
Union, and there the threshold is lower. Chuvash wikipedia has less than
10 editors (4 on the regular basis, I assume couple of more native
speakers occasionally) and is doing fine and grows steadily. There are
even a couple of projects doing fine with one native speaker editor, but
these are of course unstable against the sudden illness or loss of
interest of the editor. In general, the language subcommittee requirements
(3 to 5 permanent editors, at least one native speaker, better 2-3) seem
pretty much reasonable to me.

Cheers,
Yaroslav

> The question is whether a newly accepted language version can really grow
> to
> a respectable Wikipedia. It is not really the point whether there are
> native
> speakers, how many speakers there are, whether the language is taught at
> an
> university. This only means trying to find criteria that will tell us what
> to expect from a language version.
> Nowadays, with 2-6 years of experience, we see that
> - among the planned languages, only Esperanto is doing well, as
> interlinguistics could have told us before
> - among the "ancient" languages, Latin is doing the best, but does not
> impress. An average la.WP article has only 929 bytes, compared to 3075
> bytes
> in the Alemannic-WP. Many articles in la.WP are no real articles but
> rather
> data base entries. Even poorer is the status of Anglo-Saxon-WP or Pali-WP.
> - among the dialects or small languages of West-Germanic origin, the
> situation is very different. My study up to now shows that only Frisian
> and
> Luxemburgian do quite well, presenting to their speakers a somewhat decent
> encyclopedia about regional subjects. Bavarian-WP is mostly a joke, often
> trying to describe things in an amusing way.
>
> After a survey of user communities, it seems to me that a working WP needs
> at least 15 steady Wikipedians, who speak the language at level N (native)
> or 4 (or 3 at least). This is true for the Frisian WP, and even more for
> the
> Luxemburgian. These two West Germanic varieties do have language status,
> but
> this seems to be less important, as eo.WP is quite okay, although
> Esperanto
> hardly has status (but more than 60 registered users with level N or 4).
>
> The dedication to a language also seems to be important; it often lacks
> when
> a regional language is not really an unified language and when it does not
> differ significantly from the roof language (look at the Zealandic or
> Ripuarian WP). It is not enough an "Abstandsprache", a sociolinguist would
> say.
>
> On the other hand, Wikipedias with less than ten collaborators proficient
> in
> the language do not really make a chance, like Upper Sorbian, or the
> Phantom
> Wikipedia of Volap?k (with two "speakers" of level 2 and three "speakers"
> of
> level 1, but with a cunning bot programmer and 112.000 geographical
> stubs).
>
> I am not sure about the right policy. I find it legitimate if a regional
> language tries to improve a language with its speaker's community. But it
> might be a good idea not to encourage groups of five or seven persons who
> will not even have translated all of the MediaWiki after two years.
>
> Ziko
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ziko van Dijk
> Roomberg 30
> NL-7064 BN Silvolde
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