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