Talk:Task force/Local language projects/Planning summary

Recognise the local lingua franca

In my reading of this strategy, there appears to be an underlying assumption that each community should have its own Wikipedia in its own language. Having been brought up in South Africa and having followed events in that country since I left it, I am not fully in agreement with that assertion. Even though South Africa has eleven official languages (up from two in the Apartheid days), the lingua francahas become English – all information is published in English and one or more other languages as appropriate. I believe that a similar situation exists in India and in most of the rest of Africa (in Francophone Africa, French is the lingua franca rather than English). I recognise of course that Arabic is the lingua franca of North Africa, and the en:Middle East, but as I am not familiar with those coutries, much of what I write might not be applicable to Arabic.

In view of this, I would suggest a slightly different approach – in the case of English (and French), is it not possible to identify each article with a specific country (or group of countries) and that it would be up to administrators registered by that country’s Wikipedia Management Team to administer article. As a preliminary grouping, I would suggest that English articles be grouped under “North America”, “Europe (UK & IE)”, “Oceania (AU & NZ)”, “South Asia (former British India), “Africa” and “International”. Administrators could of course be registered in more than one area. I would anticipate that the rules in “Africa” for verification would be a lot less stringent than those in “North America” or “Europe”, but that this would encourage editors who are fluent in both the lingua franca and in a local language to use both. (I certainly make corrections to articles in the Afrikaans version of Wikipedia). I have noticed that most of the Afrikaans articles that do not have an English translation concern Afrikaans cultural topics, whereas many of the every-day topics are either similar in length or are much better covered in English (even if they are of more interest to the Afrikaans-speaking community than to the English-speaking Community)

I would also recommend that a more robust system of inter-Wiki links be established, even if it is an exchange between the various Wikipedias of current article names every 24 hours. This would encourage the writing of articles in local languages, while ensuring that red links are easily trapped if a foreign language article is renamed or deleted. (User Martinvl) 192.165.213.18 13:20, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your comment!

First I would like to make clear that this page mainly is a summary of those discussions that have taken place but not have attracted as much attention as other areas. The information should therefore not be seen as any recommendation about what action to take, but rather as a conversation starter for further discussion. It consists to a large degree of sentences copied from discussions at Talk:Task_force/Local_language_projects that has been compiled into a single running text.

I am however afraid that some of the underlying assumption you mention might have escaped into the local language recommendations as well. I have tried to make use of the term region rather than country to not imply the country-language connection there, but I would be very glad if you would like to read that page as well and give your point of view on the material there. The recommendations are the actual product of the discussions that have taken place, and it would be much more serious if those are biased toward a country-language connection in the same way.

Thank you! --Dafer45 18:57, 20 January 2010 (UTC)