Walloon and Wikipedia
March 4th, 2005Wikipedia must be the most complex web project ever.
It certainly has the most communication channels of any web project I’ve ever seen: discussion pages for every article, user pages for each contributor, links between articles in various languages, personalized “watchlists,” syndicated feeds, recent changes, a search system (which seems to be down, mostly), an IRC chat channel, and of course, the edit histories of the massive number of articles themselves, in many languages.
But, I’ve recently discovered, that’s not all — there’s also a mailing list. It has its trolls and flame wars, of course, but I find it an oddly addictive place to lurk. Language is an ever-present topic, usually in the guise of “Please start a new Wikipedia in …” As you can imagine, such debates can often descend into politics.
But this post by contributor Pablo Saratxaga, describes something surprising:
When I discovered Wikipedia, I wanted to have a Walloon version, mainly for the prestige increase that would give to the language; I didn’t knew however if that could success or not; the number of users is still low (only three very frequent contributors, and a small handfull of occasional ones; less than 10 in total, but I hope there are more readers).
That seems to be the case with many of the requests for Wikipedias in new languages on the list. (There’s something of a running joke on the list about an artificial language called “Toki Pona” which once had its own Wikipedia, which had very few “native speakers” indeed. I digress.)
But the Walloon Wikipedia took on a life of its own:
However, once it started to run it had some effects I didn’t expected at first. …the copying of articles from other wikipedias, have pushed the need for Walloon terminology about some topics that traditionally weren’t spoken or written in Walloon, in particular we are growing a list of articles about mushrooms that created the need to name in a precise way the different specias; strange as it may seem, there wasn’t attested names for mushrooms (only a generic name “mushroom”); a side effect of the wikipedia has been the creation of Walloon names for a lot of mushrooms (from their French or latin names).
Mushrooms, of all things. But the point is clear: not only is the Walloon Wikipedia a place for the language to be used, it’s acting (on a small scale) as a catalyst for its development, and conceivably this sort of thing could become part and parcel of the history of Walloon in the future.
I believe that Wikipedia and the net in general are the best tools for saving minority languages.
Those kinds of possibilities are what make me remember that I love the net…