[Wikipedia-l] Languages: crossing a border?

Mon Apr 5 22:08:31 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller wrote:

>Ivo-
>  
>
>>choises: eighter the languge is not importand and has not much articles (in
>>this case their can not be much interwiki-links to that language) or it is
>>important and has much articles.
>>    
>>
>
>Having many articles does not make a language important. With some basic  
>Klingon skills I could get the article count up to 30,000 by translating  
>the US census data. Furthermore, most conlang Wikipedias will effectively  
>be abused as dictionaries for their respective languages, and if a very  
>dedicated conlang inventor like Sonja works on the wiki, they can easily  
>get to a few thousand definition "articles" in little time. Hell, my own  
>infoAnarchy wiki has 3100 pages created by a handful of volunteers. That  
>does not mean it is an encyclopedia, nor does it mean it ever has the  
>potential to become one.
>
>I'll create a page on Meta for voting on new language Wikipedias (and I  
>would like for a vote to be also applied to Toki Pona). That seems like  
>the most reasonable solution to this problem.
>
>Regards,
>
>Erik
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>  
>
I disagree - it is not up to current users to decide whether a language 
community wants its own wikipedia. This just gives the english wikipedia 
an effective veto.

I have no problem at all with _any_ natural language having a wikipedia 
if there is the desire for one. The complaints about costs must be 
negligible compared to the cost of en, for example. What is the actual 
costs for a small wikipedia - bandwidth and a tiny bit of disk space?

The issue that has been raised refers to conlangs - I think we need to 
separate out the two. I agree that we would look silly having Klingon, 
and that we will need to moderate conlangs - in the same way that some 
articles about conlangs have been deleted if they exist only in the mind 
of their creators.

Fundamentally I don't see this as a massive problem - if we get over-run 
by conlangs then we need to reconsider, but at the moment all natural 
languages that request a wikipedia should get one.

Caroline / Secretlondon