Absolutely. I've always been firm on this point that a bunch of non-Indigenous people blundering into the area, even if they have the absolute best and purest of intentions, will almost certainly end up doing more harm than good. Leonard Collard, the Professor who is driving this, is actually an elder of the Noongar people, so he's a lot better qualified to determine what's culturally appropriate than we are.
Cheers, Craig On 8 March 2014 22:40, Andrew Owens <orderinchao...@gmail.com> wrote: > Also I think something that, given the structure of their society and > culture, they should be driving rather than us. I'd be open to helping > Aboriginal groups who approached us for technical or other assistance. But > we must always remember it's their culture and we're outsiders. At this > stage I think it's best to leave it to the contact Gnangarra had with them > and see where that goes. > > kindest regards > Andrew > > > On 8 March 2014 19:24, Craig Franklin <cfrank...@halonetwork.net> wrote: > >> For what it's worth, this is something I thought about a lot during my >> time involved with WMAU. >> >> I don't think an Indigenous language Wikipedia is going to be viable in >> the short term. Collard cites Maori and Welsh as examples of situations >> where a language has been successfully "revived", and both languages have >> reasonably active Wikipediae. But both, even during their darkest days, >> had tens of thousands of fluent speakers keeping things alive. Noongar, >> according to the press release, has less than 300. There are simply not >> the numbers of fluent speakers available to form a cohesive and active >> Wikipedia community for the sustained period of time that would be needed >> to produce something useful. >> >> Not that I don't think producing an encyclopaedia in the Noongar language >> is anything but a laudable and worthy idea, but I don't think that the >> Wikipedia model is one that is likely to bear fruit in this particular >> circumstance. On a more practical note, to create a new language edition >> of Wikipedia there are quite a few hoops to jump through, including the >> requirement to build a test edition on the Incubator with a viable >> community, which is quite a high hurdle to jump over. >> >> Cheers, >> Craig >> >> Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2014 11:19:50 +1100 >>> From: Charles Gregory <wikimediaau.li...@chuq.net> >>> To: Wikimedia Australia Chapter <wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org> >>> Subject: [Wikimediaau-l] Creation of Noongar (Aboriginal) Wikipedia >>> Message-ID: >>> <CADBtOrnpR3u1U92Sa46Kp-= >>> jr8bwsjdkxodjtok4mw4zudv...@mail.gmail.com> >>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" >>> >>> >>> >>> http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201402116439/arts-and-culture/new-media-throw-lifeline-ancient-language >>> >>> Has anyone seen this? Does it refer to a new website or a language >>> version >>> of Wikipedia? (Wikipedia doesn't appear to be mentioned in the article >>> but >>> I found it from this tweet - >>> https://twitter.com/IndigenousTweet/status/433230348801961985 ) >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> Charles >>> -------------- next part -------------- >>> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... >>> URL: < >>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaau-l/attachments/20140308/9647bbd8/attachment-0001.html >>> > >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikimediaau-l mailing list >> Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l >> >> >
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