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[Pabappa]

https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.ph ... id=6979853

OMG I can't even. Is your recording available somewhere?

http://pabappa.com/etc/may17a.mp3

Its from a version of the article as it was on May 17, 2012, but not much has changed since then. I was originally planning to make more of these, but it's a bit difficult since I have a microphone but no stand for it, so I have to hold it with one hand as I speak.

[Richard W]

I think having a Wikipedia (or many other things for that matter) in any language (either natlag or well-developped, well-used and well-attested conlang) is a good idea in and of itself, whether for the language or for the diffusion of the knowledge.

What diffusion of knowledge do you think a Scots Wikipedia should be good for?

[MacAnDàil]

It could be good for diffusion of knowledge who accesses the site, as long as it's done well (although a greater focus on Scottish content would of course be appropriate, just as the French focusses a bit more French affairs etc). Someone mentioned in a Scots Facebook group that the Catalan Wikipedia was begun just hours after the second Wikipedia (the German one) and that it's still among the Wikipedias with the most pages on it. The Scots one could be like this.

[Richard W]

It could be good for diffusion of knowledge who accesses the site, as long as it's done well (although a greater focus on Scottish content would of course be appropriate, just as the French focusses a bit more French affairs etc). Someone mentioned in a Scots Facebook group that the Catalan Wikipedia was begun just hours after the second Wikipedia (the German one) and that it's still among the Wikipedias with the most pages on it. The Scots one could be like this.

Why is it better for the diffusion of knowledge to write the articles in Scots than in English? (Or do you translate your Scots articles to English? But doesn't that reduce how much you contribute?) Are there many people whose grasp of written English is significantly worse than their grasp of written Scots? Contrariwise, there are many Scots speakers who are unable to contribute to the Scots Wikipedia because they can't spell in Scotts. What affects the focus? Is it the interests of potential contributors, or is it notability rules? I'm looking for arguments for wikipedias in languages only used by bilinguals that are not related to fostering the language, and different notability is the best I've come up with.

[Moose-tache]

I think language preservation benefits from any community project in that language. An all-Scots furry convention would do the trick.

Compared to other types of media, the barriers to accessing something like an encyclopedia are pretty low. I think a monolingual French speaker would have little difficulty getting the gist of the English article "List of Argentinian Presidents." But the content of the French Wikipedia gives French speakers a chance to collaborate on sharing knowledge and editing each other's work according to some shared criteria of relevance or truth. Something like that is of enormous significance for a speech community in decline.

[Richard W]

I think language preservation benefits from any community project in that language. An all-Scots furry convention would do the trick.

Compared to other types of media, the barriers to accessing something like an encyclopedia are pretty low. I think a monolingual French speaker would have little difficulty getting the gist of the English article "List of Argentinian Presidents." But the content of the French Wikipedia gives French speakers a chance to collaborate on sharing knowledge and editing each other's work according to some shared criteria of relevance or truth. Something like that is of enormous significance for a speech community in decline.

I believe there are a lot of French speakers with poor to non-existent English. That's not the same as Scots.

[Richard W]

The Catalan Wikipedia, by article count, is now in 20th place, whereas Spanish is in 9th place and two and a half times the size. As an information repository, I don't know how difficult the Spanish wikipedia is for Catalan speakers; it seems possible that they have issues with it. I've heard, anecdotally, that education in Basque has degraded Basques' ability to write in Spanish.

I appreciate that article count can be inflated - apparently Cebuano, Swedish, Dutch and Waray-Waray owe a lot to bots - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot for the main bot. As I guessed, the bot creator is a Swede with a Cebuano wife. I haven't looked into the Dutch bot(s) creating for the Dutch wikipedia.

[KathTheDragon]

Why does there need to be a purpose to writing content in a minor language when most or all speakers of that language are also speakers of a major language? Just because they can make do with the major language is irrelevant.

[Richard W]

Why does there need to be a purpose to writing content in a minor language when most or all speakers of that language are also speakers of a major language? Just because they can make do with the major language is irrelevant.

MacAnDàil claimed such a wiktionary was good for the diffusion of knowledge. I hoped he knew what he was talking about and would explain how, so I could use his reasoning to defend the existence of such wikipedias.

[MacAnDàil]

Should we have stricter criteria for a language in a situation of diglossia with generalised bilingualism? I think the fact that it's an encyclopedia is enough to say that it's diffusing knowledge.

What experience do you have of Wikipedia or Scots?

[Richard W]

Should we have stricter criteria for a language in a situation of diglossia with generalised bilingualism? I think the fact that it's an encyclopedia is enough to say that it's diffusing knowledge.

As these days it is considered good to support minority languages, living ones at least, we can argue that every language should be allowed its Wikipedia. **If** the articles are only contributed by its native speakers, they even create a useful resource for language tools. (English Wiktionary's ban on quoting from wikipedias does make a lot of sense.) As it is, we even have wikipedias in Latin, Pali, Sanskrit and Anglo-Saxon.

What experience do you have of Wikipedia or Scots?

Of Scots, I recall very little, even though I lived in Scotland for three years. Hearing 'head' and 'houses' pronounced as they're written is all that I recall, and that may not be particularly Scots. Maybe I was too obviously a Sassenach.

I'm a very minor Wikipedian - I'm much more of a Wiktioneer, specialising in Pali. On Wikipedia, I generally improve rather than start things. If I've looked to Wikipedia for information, and then had to research it for myself, I've a tendency to then add the information to English Wikipedia for the benefit of others.

I've added some infrastructure to the Northern Thai Wikipedia (in Incubator) by borrowing from the English Wikipedia. The documentation largely still needs translation. Unfortunately, I hadn't realised the severe attribution requirements - nor had anyone else. I at least recorded where the material had come from. I'm currently going through the articles, templates and modules adding attribution. It's depressing that the vast majority of articles consist of translations of the introductory section of the wikipedia article. However, a sustained effort of that sort did seem capable of getting the wiktionary out of incubator status. (The effort tailed off.) I wrote one article with the purpose of explaining the order of Tai Tham characters in backing store, expecting that sooner or later that explanation would be moved to a How To section - it's arguably more manual than encyclopedia. I had hoped that my wife would clean up the vocabulary and grammar, but she refused. I felt I needed a background article on Unicode. I discovered that the Thai article, which I had expected to be easier to translate, was significantly out of date compared with the English article. That is a common issue - many language's articles seem to have been adapted from the English article, and then not updated.

Now, the Northern Thai Wikipedia has been mostly put together by people who are not only language enthusiasts, but script kiddies. That means they have encouraged the Tai Tham script, which I believe most speakers can't read (the oldsters who can are dying off, and I am not sure of the number of enthusiastic youngsters). They allow the Thai script, but formally insist on characters having their local sound values, not the Siamese values. (Thais seem to find it hard to cope with the idea of the sound of a letter depending on the language it's in. That's probably a result of Indic script endemicism.) The New Testament translation into Northern Thai uses Siamese values, with near-Siamese spelling of words. There have been two attempts to implement automatic transliteration, but neither really supports creating in one writing system and editing in another.

[Travis B.]

script kiddies

That is a very different usage of "script kiddie" than I'm personally used to.

[Moose-tache]

Seen in response to Ron Jeremy's recent criminal indictment:

"If he is tried by his peers, it will be a hung jury for sure."

[Risla]

What the hell is going on with the Google reviews of this random volcano on an uninhabited island in the Arctic Ocean? I found this a while ago and am baffled every time I think of it.

[Pabappa]

No idea, but my hunch is that it's an in-joke of some sort, perhaps a even video game reference, like the similar reviews for the Death Mountain in upstate new york. Though if Im right, this joke is a lot more obscure, because while almost everyone has at least heard of Hyrule's Death Mountain, a google search for Beerenberg turns up only the real-world mountain.

[Kuchigakatai]

I wrote one article with the purpose of explaining the order of Tai Tham characters in backing store, expecting that sooner or later that explanation would be moved to a How To section - it's arguably more manual than encyclopedia. I had hoped that my wife would clean up the vocabulary and grammar, but she refused.

[...]

Now, the Northern Thai Wikipedia has been mostly put together by people who are not only language enthusiasts, but script kiddies. That means they have encouraged the Tai Tham script, which I believe most speakers can't read (the oldsters who can are dying off, and I am not sure of the number of enthusiastic youngsters). They allow the Thai script, but formally insist on characters having their local sound values, not the Siamese values. (Thais seem to find it hard to cope with the idea of the sound of a letter depending on the language it's in. That's probably a result of Indic script endemicism.) The New Testament translation into Northern Thai uses Siamese values, with near-Siamese spelling of words. There have been two attempts to implement automatic transliteration, but neither really supports creating in one writing system and editing in another.

Now that is one funny extended use of the term 'script kiddie'.

Fully fixing a non-native speaker's text is generally pretty onerous, so your wife's reaction doesn't surprise me either...

All of those issues with the Northern Thai Wikipedia seem natural to me really, because of the demographics of the users. The profile of the typical well-involved editor of something like a wiki in Northern Thai would be more akin to someone with more resources, like you or, I assume, what those language enthusiasts are like.

Nahuatl Wikipedia has had much the same problem, as editors have tended to be more familiar with Classical Nahuatl as L2 learners than else, writing more for the past glory of the Aztec Empire, rather than for other native speakers as native speakers. And as the language enthusiasts they are, they insist in marking Classical vowel length, with macrons. I remember once coming across a discussion there (in Spanish) where a native speaker said he thought it is possible to write in a style of modern Nahuatl that could be fairly comprehensible across a lot of dialects (and provided some example paragraphs), but he was frustrated the people on the site just weren't interested in that.

And Scots seems like even less of a Wikipedia worth working on than Northern Thai or Nahuatl if practical informational purposes are intended, as opposed to a project for the sake of the language itself (like Latin Wikipedia is). I'm not saying it's worthless at all, but you get serious demographic effects from the people who do have the money and time to afford editing wikis. Which is probably fine in Latin because Latin speakers tend to be fairly advantaged anyway and care about the language as an end to itself, but in e.g. Nahuatl and Northern Thai you get odd consequences like wanting to write with Classical vowel length from four centuries ago or in the Tai Tham script, which are alienating to the actual native speakers.



This effect of Wikipedia being what editors make of it is nicely appreciated in African languages. Swahili Wikipedia has been mostly edited by a group of 5 guys, 4 white European ones and one native speaker. The top dozen African languages at least would be very much worthwhile, having a base of users who're not necessarily skilled in English/French, but obviously because of severe economic problems, active editors just don't happen much. Here are three PowerPoint presentations by the Swahili long-term 5-man team (mainly the user "kipala"), which are particularly interesting (not least because the 5-man team seems to have a real concern to achieve being read by Swahili native speakers for their [the natives'] own personal purposes):

Challenges and Successes Building an African Language Wikipedia (2014)
- very linguistically interesting document on the challenges of writing in an African language, even one that's not so unprestigious as Swahili
- highlight: at some point they tried to find the word for the planet Mercury, and: "- All “old” planet names in Swahili are of Arabic origin, it should be “Utaridi” / - I find 1 literature source for “Utaridi” / - the only Tanzanian astronomer using (sometimes) Swahili cannot help"
- highlight: the (lack of) internal political weight due to being a small Wikipedia also has consequences. In 2012, to combat spam, they tried to get the San Francisco operators of Wikipedia to enforce a restriction where creation of new articles is limited to registered accounts, as English Wikipedia was now doing, and: "- Tried 3 months to get someone on Meta to listen / - Lots of contradicting advice / - Gave up: English is big + gets it, not us / - Feeling like minor tribal chief in the Empire trying to appeal to London"

Wikipedias in African Languages (2017)
Wikipedias in African Languages (2014)
- a look at the top African language Wikipedias ("ALWs") using plenty of internal statistics
- highlight: in 2014, they noted, "Vast majority of African wikipedia users go to English (or French). Swahili is relatively (a bit) stronger in Tanzania.", showing that in October-December 2013, 5.0% of Tanzanian views went to Swahili Wikipedia, and 86.7% to English Wikipedia. In 2017, they'd note that in 2016 an exciting 8-10% of connections per quarter went to Swahili Wikipedia, and about 6% by the time of the presentation.
- quality matters of course: they note that Yoruba has a lot of near-empty articles (and many more articles than Swahili), so naturally it gets less views than Swahili.
- highlight: there's plenty of potential, noting a lot of Igbo and Somali speakers must be trying to find things on Wikipedia juding by the hits from those countries to them, but there's hardly any content in both Wikipedias.
- highlight: a very large number of Wikipedia visits happen for topics related to entertainment and sexuality. It's very interesting to square that with the massive Wikia/Fandom wikis, and the network of Nintendo wikis (Bulbapedia for Pokemon, etc.). (Does this reflect a human tendency to nerd out on the details of stories?)

[Qwynegold]

https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.ph ... id=6979853

OMG I can't even. Is your recording available somewhere?

http://pabappa.com/etc/may17a.mp3

Its from a version of the article as it was on May 17, 2012, but not much has changed since then. I was originally planning to make more of these, but it's a bit difficult since I have a microphone but no stand for it, so I have to hold it with one hand as I speak.

That was dramatic!

[Qwynegold]

What the hell is going on with the Google reviews of this random volcano on an uninhabited island in the Arctic Ocean? I found this a while ago and am baffled every time I think of it.

Oh, it's in Jan Mayen. I looked around a little, and there are apparently a lot of Turkish restaurants in Olonkin "City". There are also a couple of beaches on the island where you can bring your parasol and beachball.

[Raphael]

I just wrote a ZBB post and caught myself trying to write "bute" instead of "but". I seriously wonder about the neuroscience behind that kind of thing. Ok, it probably didn't help that I slept very little last night and am now close to the point where being tired starts to feel basically like being drunk without the good parts.

[MacAnDàil]

@Richard W:
I commend your participation on the Northern Thai Wikipedia.

I might perhaps modify that to also include 'non-native fluent speakers'. This is of particular concern for African vernacular lingua francae like Swahili.

'heid' /hid/ and 'hoose'/'hous' /hus/ are indeed examples of Scots. 'Auld lang syne' is another famous example. Your position as a non-native speaker living for only a few years may well have been a factor, as is often the case with local languages in diglossic situations with widespread bilingualism. I was reading the other day (in J.J. Gumerz's Discourse Strategies) about a village in Austria where the villagers speak Slovenian only among themselves so tourists do not necessarily even realise it is spoken there. Linguistic erosion is another factor. Where were you in Scotland? Some areas, such as Edinburgh (my home town) (especially the upper-class neighbourhoods) and St Andrews have more erosion than others whereas the Shetlands, Orkney and Aberdeenshire are among the most resilient areas.