[Foundation-l] Please REJECT the latin wikinews project. inmediatly

Sat Jun 21 08:20:10 UTC 2008

George Herbert wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Mohamed Magdy wrote:
>   
>> Latin Wikinews? another playground?  seriously, these people (those who are
>> making the request) should concentrate on their projects in their other
>> language.
>>     
> Unfortunately, a lot of volunteer project work happens only and
> precisely because some core of people are interested in doing that
> particular thing, and only that particular thing.
>
> In large volunteer projects, you get things done by letting as many
> people get as involved as they want to do the things that they want,
> and successfully diverting a fraction of the total effort off in
> largescale management / directed activities required for the
> infrastructure.  That diversion is a matter of skill and guile by the
> managers in many cases 8-)
>
> In this particular case - we might get those people to do something
> else, sure.  But the odds are high that they won't.
>
> If the project wouldn't hurt us somehow or be somehow contrary to
> policy as is, stopping it from happening practically just means that
> less people work on Wikipedia overall.  It won't help out other
> Wikipedia projects at all.
>
> I don't think that we miss out much not having a news project in a
> dead language.  It's rather silly, yes.  But it doesn't harm anyone,
> and we might eventually co-opt people involved into the wider project,
> so why not?
>
>   
That's an interesting analysis.  For Simple English or the simple 
version of any other language (which has yet to be tried) it takes some 
very strong writing skills that the rest of us can't cover with big 
words.  You can start from an existing English Wikinews article, and 
rewrite it to fit a restricted vocabulary.  Any unavoidable or 
additional big word needs to be defined.

Ec