Richard W wrote: ↑Mon Aug 31, 2020 6:36 amI 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?)
That was dramatic!