Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On 12/2/08, Milos Rancic [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There is no article about the ultimate fate of the universe on sr.wp, while there is no article about Grgur Branković on en.wp. Conclusion about usefulness is obvious: for the most of pupils and their parents the article about Grgur Branković may be used (and it is in Serbian), while speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are comparable with watching Battlestar Galactica or Star Track (and it is in English). Milos I would say your English fluency is good enough to write one, please do. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grgur_Brankovićaction=editredlink=1 The less obvious benefit of supporting failing projects is that most of them will eventually return the favor by identifying topics which are encyclopedic despite being completely unknown to native English speakers. This alone is a good enough reason to keep these projects open. Same with the other article you mentioned, would it be anything like this? :-) http://sr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Конаčни_судбина_Свемираaction=editredlink=1 —C.W. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Milos Rancic wrote: A couple of years passed from the time when I realized that it was my social bias. I think that in 2005 I've started to have this kind of conversations: Wikipedia is very useful for me! -- You mean, Wikipedia in English? -- No, Wikipedia in Serbian. At the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago, many of the 100+ participants were librarians or teachers in social sciences, and a smaller number were into natural sciences and technology. All presentations were in Swedish and on the first day's workshops we used the Swedish Wikipedia as our playground. On the second day, one of the presentations was made by an astronomer, Dainis Dravins, who talked about his experience from letting undergraduate college students do their project presentations either as posters or as Wikipedia articles. This picture is from his lecture, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LA2_Wikipedia_Academy_2008_lecture_by_Dainis_Dravins.jpg Only after a while did it become apparent that he was talking of the English Wikipedia. Some surprised librarian asked are you now talking of the English Wikipedia? His answer was something like yes, the Swedish is almost completely useless (for advanced astronomy). In the undergraduate astronomy classes he was teaching, all literature is in English. This seemed like an unknown planet to the Swedish librarians. And I guess that their surprise came as an equal surprise to the astronomer. I think one of the greatest values of Wikipedia Academy is when the attendees get to see each other's reactions to Wikipedia. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, I am sure that you and I have learned to create new articles. In the usability study, people who were completely new to MediaWiki were asked to perform well described tasks. All testsubjects were unable to create new articles. They did nothing wrong, they just could not figure out how to do this. These tests were recorded on video and analysed by usability experts. Consequently the results are relevant and provide the best explanation that I have had so far why so many of our projects are failing. The good news is that the issue that has been identified is one that we can remedy. The even better news is that the UNICEF developers have created extensions that have been proven to make a difference. We only have to understand their results and apply the knowledge gained. Obviously we will want to ensure that this software complies with our standards, but this is something that we have the expertise for. This is a clear win-win situation as UNICEF stands to gain their functionality adopted by the WMF and consequently have less of a maintenance issue. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Amir E. Aharoni [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At Wikimania 2008 a presentation was given by developers from UNICEF who had done proper usability studies. They found that 100% of their newbie testsubjects were not able to create a new article. They must have done something wrong. If they are right, then it must be an illusion that Wikipedia has several millions of articles. I find the creation of a new article very easy. On the other hand, adding a link somewhere that says create a new article won't hurt. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace. - T. Moore ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Amir E. Aharoni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Getting empowered is not equal to learning English. The two are not equal, to be sure. But, at the risk of sounding pugilistic, I will say that there probably is a positive correlation between knowing a more popular language and knowledge empowerment. Even if this is true, the foundation is more interested in getting people involved (which means targeting native languages) then in trying to convert people to more popular (and possibly more empowering) languages. To do the second task we would still want to create projects in small languages so we could write learning resources to teach people the big languages. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
GerardM - what steps need to be taken to begin testing and adapting the UNICEF usability extensions? Where would be a good project to begin - perhaps the Simple English Wikipedia, if that community is amenable? That its in English might make development easier, and a more usable interface might fit with the philosophy of the Simple wiki. Milos - you wrote: To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp. Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm curious to know what data changed your mind. Moreschi - What you advocate is basically cultural imperialism, which is a recipe for conflict and disruption - not education. Making knowledge available to as many people as possible is the goal; if those people don't speak English, they should not be excluded. As others have noted, it is much easier and much more in line with our goal to find contributors who can build suitable references in all languages. To your point that these references are likely to have poor quality anyway - I'm not sure that makes sense logically. A small community does not necessarily equal poor quality content; I imagine that the size of the community correlates with the volume of content, and while there are less people to police quality issues there is less content to police. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Fajro [EMAIL PROTECTED]: WTF??? Some people really need read more about cultural diversity Bible belt America does not share a culture with say Perth or indeed much of New York. and linguistic rights No such thing. Language can be a tool for control. With English this is hard. There is simply too much of it out there an English speakers move around too much. It isn't really practical to keep them out. But if your general population doesn't speak English that doesn't matter. By actively promoting minority languages you increase the longevity and frequency of such situations. A population that does not speak English is one that it is fairly easy for those in power (be it dictators of tribal elders or religious leaders) to control the information flow to. And wikipedia can do nothing about that. A single data source is too easy to block. So we tolerate smaller languages or languages with lower levels of existing information but should not go as far as actively promoting them. For the time being we accept that yes they are what we are going to have to use if we want to work with such groups (and heh even North Korea has a hard time dealing with Korean speakers among it tourists). But that does not mean we should make any attempt to promote them. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Nathan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Milos - you wrote: To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp. Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm curious to know what data changed your mind. I don't know how exactly Milos arrived at this conclusion, but i have a half-educated guess. original-research-and-educated-guesses Many - quite possibly most - readers arrive at Wikipedia through a search engine. Now the question is - which language they use to search the web. It's quite natural that a significant number of people in Serbia will search the web in Serbian. The same goes for Israel/Hebrew and Russia/Russian. The problem is with less privileged languages. Belarusian is official in Belarus and the (arguable) statistics say that most people there consider it to be their native language, but in practice Russian is considerably more popular in the published media, so when they google for something, they do it in Russian, because they don't expect to find anything useful in Belarusian. Or take Hindi. The second most spoken language in the world and the main official language of a country where many people are online. (1% of India's population is MANY.) Yet the Hindi Wikipedia has less than 30,000 articles (if i read the Indic digits correctly...) Now, these are languages which have millions of speakers, rich literature and an official status; when it comes to languages which are even less privileged, people go straight to the English WP (or French or Spanish.) /original-research-and-educated-guesses Speaking in Linguistic terms, it is a question of [[Pragmatics]]. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace. - T. Moore ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Ziko van Dijk [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Anyone who doubts about the deplorable state of, well, many language editions of Wikipedia, may have a look at this: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gleederoldid=25822 Gleeder That's hardly a good example - we're never going to have a good Wikipedia in a language mostly spoken by members of a culture that shuns modern technology, are we? Those speakers that aren't Amish are generally of the older generation, a demographic we have difficulty attracting (work has been done on that front, with some success as I understand it, but it requires an existing community to start the process). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Don't forget Esperanto. Since when has Esperanto been a global language? It was a failed attempt at creating one, that's all. There is very little point in anyone learning it except for the fun of it (if you enjoy that sort of thing). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
@Pedro :Yep, it's a two way interaction that I believe benefits all projects (sort of human interwiki) @Thomas:Echo would be the English word, thanks. Ecco however is also correct eEnglish, ref. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_non-eEnglish_spelling_and_grammar_campaign. (Note to self: Irony should be avvoided in online communication, especially when writing foreignly) @Gerard: Yes, there will be a lot of loud voices, but in the end we'll manage to work out this as an improvement to help new (and perhaps older) users as well. There was A LOT of load voices at Commons when (what I still hope is) a more userfriendly uploadsystem was launched, but it seems to be working just fine ;) We may get more nonsense articles going straight to speedy deletion, but the way to raise the quality of wikip/media is certainly not to avvoid maiking it easier for people to edit, Finn R 2008/12/1 Pedro Sanchez [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:44 PM, Finn Rindahl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'd like to ecco (is that an eEnglish word..?) Michael Finney here. Most people who engage them self in a small language wikimedia projects will sooner or later participate in projects like en:wp and commons as well - and thus both learn more about the facts of reality as well as communicating with others in a (for them) foreign language. An also a fair share of people who initially engage into enwip ant he alike, eventually decide to migrate to smaller projects. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, The Dutch Wikipedia has passed 500.000 articles.. if a seven year old Dutch kid would be looking for a paard, the child would not get what we have in store when it asks for a horse in stead.. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=paardgo=Try+exact+match http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Horse I know of smaller WMF projects where even the admins have given up on Commons.. So yes, Commons is a great project but it has only 3,5 million media files and it does not support other languages like it could and in my opinion should. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/12/1 Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hoi, There is no point in usability studies when the lessons learned are not applied. At the Boston Wikimania there was another person who had done studies on usability and MediaWiki. She even presented about it at the Hacker days... The problem is the info tends to be around it an easy to access and search form. As to Commons, it is effectively useless to the people that do not speak English. Really? Even with the extensive uselang stuff in say german? -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hoi, The Dutch Wikipedia has passed 500.000 articles.. if a seven year old Dutch kid would be looking for a paard, the child would not get what we have in store when it asks for a horse in stead.. People use the search feature on commons? I would assume they would click the link at the bottom of http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paard_(dier) and get taken to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Equus_caballus?uselang=nl -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, When you are to build a system that connects Wikipedia / Wiktionary etc articles to Commons, you are building a system that relies on the articles to exist in the languages you want to get the data from. So it is restricted to the data that you have in the projects. To build this data, I would use the software developed by Daniel Kintzler for his master thesis and expand it for the languages Daniel does not yet support. This approach will work for Wikipedias. What you get is the type of data that can be included in a system that is based on the OmegaWiki notions and that will need a database that is quite similar to OmegaWiki. With an OmegaWiki implementation, we can include information from languages we do not support within the WMF. Consequently we can provide infromation that is not provided by any of the projects. So, yes you can. However there is more that you can do. As you may know, in OmegaWiki we demonstrated how to connect to both Commons and Wikipedias. The big advantage it provides that there is no need for connecting to Commons from each Wikipedia article. You only connect from the concept both to Commons and the various Wikipedias. Yes, OmegaWiki is Open Source and its data is Open Content. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Erik Moeller [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/12/1 geni [EMAIL PROTECTED]: People use the search feature on commons? I would assume they would click the link at the bottom of http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paard_(dier)http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paard_%28dier%29and get taken to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Equus_caballus?uselang=nl This is a valid point, especially when one uses it as a starting point to think about search. It might be feasible to build a search tool on the basis of this existing tagging of Wikipedia articles to Commons media -- and similarly, Wiktionary, Wikinews, and so on. This is an alternative to the notion of one giant ontology that's used for tagging. Instead you would treat a wiki -- any wiki -- as the ontology. So you could do a Wikinews/Commons search for terrorism, a Wiktionary/Commons search for pronunciations, etc. Because the approach would be wiki-agnostic, it would also be language-agnostic, and yield useful results as long as the underlying wiki is large enough and its articles are well tagged to Commons. What would be the technical requirements of this approach and what would be its disadvantages? -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Michael Finney wrote: Thank you for your comments. As a person who manages a small wiki project and two language forks from it, I found some of the comments very disturbing... almost frightening that such exist. Your comments re-affirm my confidence in the Wikimedia Foundation and its purpose. I certainly don't see it as frightening that a debate over the status of small minority languages *exists*. One always has, and continues to exist, in many countries, with the prevailing views differing greatly around the world. I personally come from a family whose native tongue was Pontian Greek, a language that is quickly becoming extinct, and most of whose users actively decided to switch to modern Greek, partly in order to reduce ethnic strife between different kinds of Greeks and make for a more unified modern nation. There are of course negative aspects to that approach, just as there are positive and negative aspects to any aspect of assimilation versus maintenance of differences. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Erik Moeller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: What would be the technical requirements of this approach and what would be its disadvantages? It would require 1 bot and a copy of whichever wikis you wanted to work from. Just harvest all the links to commons and create those on commons as category redirects (you can also harvest all the redirects that point at the article with the link to commons and create redirecting cats for them as well) Problems? Maintenance wise it would be tricky. If you were instead going to build something server side you could use the articles the images are used in as keywords for your search engine but by then we are getting a little beyond my knowledge of search design. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On 12/1/08, Andrew Whitworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To do the second task we would still want to create projects in small languages so we could write learning resources to teach people the big languages. I for one would enjoy learning resources targeted at those wishing to learn the smaller languages. Surely this can work both ways. —C.W. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Gerard, it would be good, if you could add links to all the extension pages in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Uniwiki, which point to pages which use those extensions. There are links to two pages who use the Uniwiki package, but I was not able to find live examples of most of the single extensions. Where can I find CreatePage live in action, or 'Generic Edit Page' or Layouts? Screenshots on the single extension pages would be good too. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Fajro wrote: On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:08 PM, geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No. You can argue for the tolerance of minority languages but actively promoting them conflicts with Wikimedia's stated objectives. How? Do you edit wikipedia to give Free Access To All Human Knowledge only to the educated elite? It seems to me that this would differ greatly depending on the minority language. Some minority languages, despite being minority, have millions of monolingual speakers. Clearly if these people are going to get Wikipedia's information without learning a new language, we need a good Wikipedia in that language, because otherwise the information is not available in a language they can understand. But other minority languages have few to no monolingual speakers; some barely have any native speakers at all. The presence or absence of a Wikipedia in those language is more of an issue of language politics and language preservation than actual dissemination of an encyclopedia's contents. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
At Wikimania 2008 a presentation was given by developers from UNICEF who had done proper usability studies. They found that 100% of their newbie testsubjects were not able to create a new article. I wasn't there, so didn't see the presentation. Did they detail the problems these test subjects had? The first stage in fixing any problem is to identify precisely what the problem is. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, The presentation is online. I blogged about this extension in the past.. http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/search/label/Usability Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Thomas Dalton [EMAIL PROTECTED] At Wikimania 2008 a presentation was given by developers from UNICEF who had done proper usability studies. They found that 100% of their newbie testsubjects were not able to create a new article. I wasn't there, so didn't see the presentation. Did they detail the problems these test subjects had? The first stage in fixing any problem is to identify precisely what the problem is. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Do we care that 80% of our projects are failing? Thanks, GerardM No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian wikibooks (doesn't matter if that doesn't exist, you get my point). Such projects exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any readers. Let them all fail, with the exception of Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and commons. CM _ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, Small projects using MediaWiki for any of the languages that you indicate are relevant are failing for exactly the same reason. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do we care that 80% of our projects are failing? Thanks, GerardM No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian wikibooks (doesn't matter if that doesn't exist, you get my point). Such projects exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any readers. Let them all fail, with the exception of Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and commons. CM _ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Please, speak for yourself :) I *do* care, and if there is an easy and definite solution, I'd love to embrace it. I think we should care about our little siblings, about the smaller languages as we call them, and support them if possible. I can only hope you were being extremely ironic :) Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! Even if it only contains 1000 articles, you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world. It won't do miracles of course, but every tiny little bit helps. And now imagine that this goes for all languages. And not only encyclopediae, but also learning books, dictionaries and perhaps one day even other collections. Wikipedia *does* make a difference. (and I'd almost add: donate now ;-) ) Best regards, Lodewijk 2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do we care that 80% of our projects are failing? Thanks, GerardM No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian wikibooks (doesn't matter if that doesn't exist, you get my point). Such projects exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any readers. Let them all fail, with the exception of Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and commons. CM _ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
No it doesn't. The greatest tool for the education of those poor sods in the 3rd world is the English Wikipedia, plus Spanish, French, etc. But mostly en. Here's why. 1. It's the biggest. It's the best. You learn the most. 2. You get to practice reading English at the same time. English is THE global language and will become even more so, mostly because of the economic dominance of the US and the fact that it's so easy to learn. You can learn to speak understandable English in a month: even if/when China takes over economically, we'll still do business in English. I know hundreds of people who can speak English as a second language: I know not one non-Chinese who speaks fluent Mandarin. Mr Botswana will do far better economically from en than he will from botswanian wiki. 3. It is not run by monomaniacal ethnic zealots, who find smaller wikis laughably easy to take over. Even ru wiki has a problem with this, I've heard. On en, people like me spend hours making sure that history is not distorted by fanatics and that our narratives offer an accurate, rational fair picture. There's little food for fundamentalists. God knows what crap you find on smaller wikis with less editorial oversight. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Bombay, this seems particularly relevant. Conclusion: let them all fail, bar the big ones. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:04:43 +0100 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing Please, speak for yourself :) I *do* care, and if there is an easy and definite solution, I'd love to embrace it. I think we should care about our little siblings, about the smaller languages as we call them, and support them if possible. I can only hope you were being extremely ironic :) Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! Even if it only contains 1000 articles, you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world. It won't do miracles of course, but every tiny little bit helps. And now imagine that this goes for all languages. And not only encyclopediae, but also learning books, dictionaries and perhaps one day even other collections. Wikipedia *does* make a difference. (and I'd almost add: donate now ;-) ) Best regards, Lodewijk 2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do we care that 80% of our projects are failing? Thanks, GerardM No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian wikibooks (doesn't matter if that doesn't exist, you get my point). Such projects exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any readers. Let them all fail, with the exception of Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and commons. CM _ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, I wish for 80% of our projects to have the same problems as our bigger projects. It would be cool that we could compare the quality issues of the Xhosa Wikipedia or any of the bottom 80%. It takes content in order to talk about quality. The content is not there and consequently quality is not an issue. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Yaroslav M. Blanter [EMAIL PROTECTED] Actually, the quality is a serious problem of all projects including en.wp. I thought it is obvious for everybody, but if not, I can provide more detail. Cheers Yaroslav Please, speak for yourself :) I *do* care, and if there is an easy and definite solution, I'd love to embrace it. I think we should care about our little siblings, about the smaller languages as we call them, and support them if possible. I can only hope you were being extremely ironic :) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Huh? Could you please provide some evidence for this striking claim that the French and German Wikipedias are failing? Let me be clear: I don't think anybody reads the English wikibooks either! CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:15:46 +0100 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing Hoi, Small projects using MediaWiki for any of the languages that you indicate are relevant are failing for exactly the same reason. Thanks, GerardM _ BigSnapSearch.com - 24 prizes a day, every day - Search Now! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/117442309/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
We should indeed care. One thing is that we should do whatever we can to help new projects grow to a selfsustainable size in terms of content and contributors. The second is that we must accept that a lot of new projects will fail, but that this is no reason not to go ahead with even more new projects. If 1 out of 10 new projects survive, then the time spent on the 9 failed projects was not waisted. That one project in some small language helps fullfilling the vision of the Foundation as stated on those fundraisingpages I'm just now translating into the small language of Norwegian. Thanks to Lodewijk for a posting here that actually gave me some inspiration to continue translating ;) Finn Rindahl 2008/11/30 Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hoi, I wish for 80% of our projects to have the same problems as our bigger projects. It would be cool that we could compare the quality issues of the Xhosa Wikipedia or any of the bottom 80%. It takes content in order to talk about quality. The content is not there and consequently quality is not an issue. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Yaroslav M. Blanter [EMAIL PROTECTED] Actually, the quality is a serious problem of all projects including en.wp. I thought it is obvious for everybody, but if not, I can provide more detail. Cheers Yaroslav Please, speak for yourself :) I *do* care, and if there is an easy and definite solution, I'd love to embrace it. I think we should care about our little siblings, about the smaller languages as we call them, and support them if possible. I can only hope you were being extremely ironic :) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Right, you act as if smaller wikis were tremendous vessels of potential just waiting to be filled with pearls of wisdom, when experience suggests they are landfill sites. If Google develop something that could automatically translate every article on en into perfect Mongolian/Latvian/Zulu, your comment would make perfect sense. As it is it makes none. And I suggest you google my sig. The irony is impressive. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:31:09 +0100 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing Hoi, You added some pearl of wisdom at the end. It is obviously wasted for the people like me who do not understand Latin. In a similar way, if these other people do not read and understand English Spanish French etc, they are not informed with our pearls of wisdom.. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi [EMAIL PROTECTED] No it doesn't. The greatest tool for the education of those poor sods in the 3rd world is the English Wikipedia, plus Spanish, French, etc. But mostly en. Here's why. 1. It's the biggest. It's the best. You learn the most. 2. You get to practice reading English at the same time. English is THE global language and will become even more so, mostly because of the economic dominance of the US and the fact that it's so easy to learn. You can learn to speak understandable English in a month: even if/when China takes over economically, we'll still do business in English. I know hundreds of people who can speak English as a second language: I know not one non-Chinese who speaks fluent Mandarin. Mr Botswana will do far better economically from en than he will from botswanian wiki. 3. It is not run by monomaniacal ethnic zealots, who find smaller wikis laughably easy to take over. Even ru wiki has a problem with this, I've heard. On en, people like me spend hours making sure that history is not distorted by fanatics and that our narratives offer an accurate, rational fair picture. There's little food for fundamentalists. God knows what crap you find on smaller wikis with less editorial oversight. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Bombay, this seems particularly relevant. Conclusion: let them all fail, bar the big ones. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:04:43 +0100 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing Please, speak for yourself :) I *do* care, and if there is an easy and definite solution, I'd love to embrace it. I think we should care about our little siblings, about the smaller languages as we call them, and support them if possible. I can only hope you were being extremely ironic :) Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! Even if it only contains 1000 articles, you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world. It won't do miracles of course, but every tiny little bit helps. And now imagine that this goes for all languages. And not only encyclopediae, but also learning books, dictionaries and perhaps one day even other collections. Wikipedia *does* make a difference. (and I'd almost add: donate now ;-) ) Best regards, Lodewijk 2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do we care that 80% of our projects are failing? Thanks, GerardM No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian wikibooks (doesn't matter if that doesn't exist, you get my point). Such projects exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any readers. Let them all fail, with the exception of Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and commons. CM _ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, Given that UNICEF has done proper usability studies. Given that they have measured the success of the changes they made. We can be aware of the lessons that were learned in this way. We can adopt the changes and learn how it affects *our *smaller projects. When we cooperate with UNICEF, when we apply the lessons learned we can expect to do better. When 80% are considered to be a failure, when we identify a major reason why, when we apply the lessons learned and these projects still fail, it is not because of something that we could have done. I am raising awareness of the issues we know we have with usability. I am involved in getting these extensions tested so that people can safely adopt them. I urge the WMF to allow projects to have the benefit of improved usability. When projects choose to improve usability, we will get metrics on how this makes a difference. We may learn what approaches work in which cultures and not in others. It would be so cool if we could discuss these things because we have this experience. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Mohamed Magdy [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Christiano Moreschi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Do we care that 80% of our projects are failing? Thanks, GerardM No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian wikibooks (doesn't matter if that doesn't exist, you get my point). Such projects exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any readers. Let them all fail, with the exception of Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and commons. I fail to see the purpose of this response except rm -rf -exclude:en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and commons which //isn't going to happen//. I care and I think we should have a usability expert. but I wouldn't call it failure (as i understand failure means something that used to work and now deteriorates or stops), it is more of a project that didn't start yet. -- --alnokta ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/11/30 effe iets anders [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! English is an official language of Botswana. Quite a lot of African countries move to English or French for education above a certain level. Even if it only contains 1000 articles, ~102 articles currently. you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world. What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly questionable if we would even want to. This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them becoming POV forks. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, EMC2 is a company who sells storage solutions to big companies. I was at a presentation of their documentation manager. He informed his audience that the people who buy their products invariably state that they prefer the English documentation. They always get the translations as well. The benefit to EMC2 is that they sell more products. The translation of their documentation adds pennies to the pound in costs, costs that are easily offset by the increased sales. The point is that people understand things better when they are addressed in their own language EVEN when they can read the language that is foreign to them. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/11/30 effe iets anders [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! English is an official language of Botswana. Quite a lot of African countries move to English or French for education above a certain level. Even if it only contains 1000 articles, ~102 articles currently. you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world. What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly questionable if we would even want to. This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them becoming POV forks. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Have you forgotten that these are WIKIS we are talking about? It's not just a matter of translation: the technology isn't there to do it automatically and we don't have the manpower do it manually. Even if the technology were there, it's a WIKI. Unlike your friend's translations, our content can drastically deteriorate and become useless overnight if nobody's watching it. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:58:54 +0100 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing Hoi, EMC2 is a company who sells storage solutions to big companies. I was at a presentation of their documentation manager. He informed his audience that the people who buy their products invariably state that they prefer the English documentation. They always get the translations as well. The benefit to EMC2 is that they sell more products. The translation of their documentation adds pennies to the pound in costs, costs that are easily offset by the increased sales. The point is that people understand things better when they are addressed in their own language EVEN when they can read the language that is foreign to them. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/11/30 effe iets anders [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! English is an official language of Botswana. Quite a lot of African countries move to English or French for education above a certain level. Even if it only contains 1000 articles, ~102 articles currently. you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world. What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly questionable if we would even want to. This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them becoming POV forks. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _ BigSnapSearch.com - 24 prizes a day, every day - Search Now! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/117442309/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Sorry, but to me this just sounds like FUD. Do you have any information to back up your claims about small wikis deteriorating? Don't forget, these are WIKIS we are talking about. In WIKIS everyone can change the content, and even though people may add bad content, they may also add good content (and believe it or not, there is functionality that makes people able to remove bad edits!). You're applying the problems of the large wikis to the smaller ones, which is not really appropriate, because they are on completely different levels. Sure, the smaller wikis have problems as well, but they are very different from the problems enwiki and dewiki are having. 2008/12/1 Christiano Moreschi [EMAIL PROTECTED] Have you forgotten that these are WIKIS we are talking about? It's not just a matter of translation: the technology isn't there to do it automatically and we don't have the manpower do it manually. Even if the technology were there, it's a WIKI. Unlike your friend's translations, our content can drastically deteriorate and become useless overnight if nobody's watching it. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:58:54 +0100 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing Hoi, EMC2 is a company who sells storage solutions to big companies. I was at a presentation of their documentation manager. He informed his audience that the people who buy their products invariably state that they prefer the English documentation. They always get the translations as well. The benefit to EMC2 is that they sell more products. The translation of their documentation adds pennies to the pound in costs, costs that are easily offset by the increased sales. The point is that people understand things better when they are addressed in their own language EVEN when they can read the language that is foreign to them. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/11/30 effe iets anders [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! English is an official language of Botswana. Quite a lot of African countries move to English or French for education above a certain level. Even if it only contains 1000 articles, ~102 articles currently. you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world. What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly questionable if we would even want to. This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them becoming POV forks. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _ BigSnapSearch.com - 24 prizes a day, every day - Search Now! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/117442309/direct/01/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Jon Harald Søby http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:48 PM, geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly questionable if we would even want to. This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them becoming POV forks. What is relatively unknown to foreigners is that even English (or any other word language as lingua franca) is preferable language for education, the most of people under ~18-20 and above 50 are very bad in that lingua franca, no matter what the region is. Simply, foreigners usually don't talk with people who don't know English (or other world language). Even we assume that the upper limit for knowing English will raise, it is hardly to assume that lower limit will go significantly down. This is especially important because pidgins (let's say, WoW or CS pidgins) locally are not translated to English and then to a native language, but directly into a native language. (To give a plastic example: ASAP will not be translated as as soon as possible and then into a local language phrase, but directly to a local language phrase.) So, if you are able to make an internet pidgin-English project, it could work for younger. However, en.wp is not working. To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp. Completely other question is that a very small specter of population is able to participate on en.wp, even in not so poor countries. Other thing is inside of multilingual developing countries which decided to use English in the educational system. But, it makes another problem: significant part of population won't get even basic education if it is in foreign language (cf. literacy level in Arab and other Muslim countries, even the richest: only very rich, socialist and not so populated Libya has 82% of literacy, while not so rich [per capita] and not socialist Iran and Pakistan have 82% and 86%; even extremely rich UAE and Saudi Arabia have 79% and [around] 80%). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:25 AM, geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Serbian isn't a launguage. It's a dialect of the Central South Slavic diasystem and one of the projects I had in mind when I brought up smaller languages becoming POV forks. Saying that something is not a language is a strong claim. Talking about one standard language as a dialect is a non-scientific claim. Serbian language is one of the standard varieties based on Eastern-Herzegovian dialect of Shtokavian diasystem. Also, it is not based on Central South Slavic diasystem, because standard Serbian language is not based on Torlakian, Chakavian nor Kaykavian. You also need to considered the argument beyond wikipedia. The ratio of scientific papers published in english compared to any eastern European language (except to an extent Russian) is very considerable. This is not something wikipedia can do anything about. Even if such languages do get more extensive beyond a certain point they will be relying on English references. Yes. This is true. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On Sunday 30 November 2008 23:24:58 Christiano Moreschi wrote: No it doesn't. The greatest tool for the education of those poor sods in the 3rd world is the English Wikipedia, plus Spanish, French, etc. But mostly en. Here's why. Did you know... ...that not everyone knows English? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
The point is that the quality of the vast majority of scientific-related articles even in English Wikipedia is laughable anyway. This is a much more general problem that the language division. Cheers Yaroslav You also need to considered the argument beyond wikipedia. The ratio of scientific papers published in english compared to any eastern European language (except to an extent Russian) is very considerable. This is not something wikipedia can do anything about. Even if such languages do get more extensive beyond a certain point they will be relying on English references. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On Monday 01 December 2008 02:25:10 geni wrote: 2008/12/1 Milos Rancic [EMAIL PROTECTED]: So, if you are able to make an internet pidgin-English project, it could work for younger. However, en.wp is not working. To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp. Serbian isn't a launguage. It's a dialect of the Central South Slavic diasystem and one of the projects I had in mind when I brought up smaller languages becoming POV forks. Central South Slavic diasystem is not a language and as such can not have dialects. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
