[Wikipedia-l] A proposal for a new language in wikipedia

Fri Sep 17 19:56:36 UTC 2004

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 15:21:39 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> >Uhh... what about Hebrew? Manchu? Manx? Cornish? Since when do
> >languages not revive successfully by teaching them to children?
> >
> They revive successfully by teaching them to children as a daily-use
> language.  Is Wikipedia related to that?  I suppose it could be in some
> ways, but I can't seriously see people using the Gothic Wikipedia as a
> source of general encyclopedia-type information.  If you want to know

There is a Rosetta Project which focuses on cataloguing texts in all
the world's languages.  Unfortunately, it has been developing very
slowly and has had trouble
generating a community around its efforts, because there is no direction to its
content, beyond an effort to translate basic word lists into all
languages.  Wikipedia provides both a forum and a direction for
building a corpus in a dying or marginal language.

This isn't to demean the rosetta project in any way; they already have
content in
thousands of languages, and a million dollar grant from the US
government to continue their work.  But I think one of Wikipedia's
important side-effects is its
potential to preserve (and store useful, even self-bootstrapping,
content in) disappearing languages.

-- 
+sj+