[Wikipedia-l] Re: Languages: crossing a border?

Mon Apr 5 09:24:40 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller wrote:

> The Toki Pona language was constructed by Sonja Kisa. Sonja Kisa is also  
> User:Sonjaaa and the primary instigator of the Toki Pona Wikipedia. Toki  
> Pona is not an officially recognized language anywhere.  Now the Toki Pona  
> Wikipedia is effectively not an encyclopedia, but a language development  
> wiki for the TP language.
> 
> [...] There  
> are 133 Google hits on Sonja Kisa's name. There are 13,100 hits on my  
> name. Heck, there are only 894 hits on "Toki Pona" and Google thinks I  
> misspelled "Toki Ona" (whatever that is). I bet I could push an artificial  
> language I create to 5,000 hits within a couple of months.

It seems that you are working from (at least) two assumptions:

(1) It seems that you think your Google counts have some sort of 
significance or meaning. I think this assumption is dangerous to make. 
Especially your own assessment that you would be able to create 5,000 
hits within a couple of months, should repel this myth easily. As for 
myself, I respect Toki Pona and believe that having a Wikipedia in it is 
OK; not because it has a high number of Google hits, but because I came 
across the language, found it interesting, and realised that it is a 
much more complete and serious conlang project than most other conlangs.

(2) You mentioned that people who come across the English (or any other 
major language) article on some popular topic, and see an "Elvish" or 
"Klingon" or "Toki Pona" link at the top in the "Other languages:" row, 
would take this as an indication that Wikimedia is not serious enough or 
has no credibility. This is your opinion that you are generalising to 
all (or most) people. Myself, I think most people would react in a more 
positive way: "Whee, they have a sense of humour too, just like Google." 
Speaking of which, according to your logic Google would not be taken 
seriously either because it has Klingon and h4x0r translations.

The important question here is whether or not the amount of people 
recruited as a result of this fun factor outweighs the amount of people 
driven away under the sentiment that Wikimedia is "not serious". Your 
assumption is that it doesn't, but this is open to speculation. 
Analogously, most people assume that Wiki wouldn't work because they 
think the amount of people who would vandalise and wreak havoc would 
outweigh the amount of dedicated volunteers who clean up after them. In 
that sense, we have already seen that these kinds of assumptions can be 
majorly wrong.

> Shouldn't those languages  
> undergo some basic public approval process first, though, so that we can  
> determine whether there is really any value in creating them?

Yes, maybe we should. I'm pretty sure Toki Pona would make it.

Timwi