Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Scots

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Scots Wikipedia[edit]

submitted verification final decision
This proposal has been approved.
The Board of Trustees and language committee have deemed that there is sufficient grounds and community to create the new language project.

The closing committee member provided the following comment:

The requested project was created at sco: at an indeterminate date. Note that this request was approved before the implementation of the standardised Language proposal policy, and should not be used as a model for future requests. —{admin} Pathoschild 05:01, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Proposal summary
Please read the handbook for requesters for help using this template correctly.
  • 1.6 million active speakers and 2+ million passive understanding
  • Location(s) spoken: Scotland, Northern Ireland
  • Closely related languages: English
  • External links to organizations that promote the language:
  • Notes/comments:
    1. Saforrest (don't speak it, but willing to learn, provided this is a general Scots encyclopedia)
    2. Derek Ross -- Native speaker and willing to do admin and bureaucrat duties.
    3. Lincher -- Know a little, willing to learn it throughly.
    4. Cal T -- very willing to help out.
    5. User:Võrok -- I support creating Wikipedia in Scots! -Võrok 15:02, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    6. Mendor -- not a native speaker, but an enthusiastic learner
    7. BryanAJParry -- not a native speaker, but a learner, with a passion for language; I would be a regular contributor.
    8. Trilobite -- Don't think I'll be a major contributor but I'd love to help out here and there.
    9. Olve 05:26, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    10. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:59, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    • Those wishing to learn some Scots in order to contribute might consider looking for a little book called Teach yourself Doric by Douglas Kynoch, ISBN:1-898218-14-5. It's a humorous parody of the Teach Yourself X language books but it also gives a good grounding in conversational Doric (Northern Scots). Recommended.
    • Scots is certainly deviant enough to be called a language and to open a Wikipedia in. But wouldn't it be more convenient to create a Wikipedia for all Scots variants, not just Lowlands Scots (the other variants, for the uninitiated reader, are Norn Scots and Ulster Scots)?--Caesarion 11:41, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
      • That's a good idea. We could use the subdomains sco-ll (Lowland Scots,) sco-nr (Norn Scots,) and sco-us (Ulster Scots.) Scott Gall 08:15, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
        • We can't use those subdomains. (25 Feb 2005)
        • And in any case there's no need -- Derek Ross 08:21, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
      • Yes, it is. (25 Feb 2005)
        • All right, if we can't use those subdomains, we could have just one subdomain and then three ways of writing it (one for Lallans, one for Norn, and one for Ullans.) They did a similar thing with the Cornish and Breton Wikipedias. Click on the links to see what happened. And speaking of languages with small WPs, contribute to the Nahuatl wiki - if you know any Nahuatl - and get it up to 100 articles. Scott Gall 04:36, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
      • To be sure, I was talking about Norn Scots dialect, not about the extinct language Norn. The dialect that is sometimes referred to as Norn Scots bears at least some traces of Norn, but for disambiguattion purpouses, one can use terms like Shaetlan, Shetland/Orkney Scots and the like.--Caesarion 20:22, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • I am all in favour of a Scots Wikipedia. However, given the relatively small number of speakers especially with the dialects other than Lowland, I am wondering if there is some kind of unified written variant (formal or informal) of Scots that transcends all spoken dialects. That works fine already with Wikipedias like Low Saxon (nds) and Rumantsh (rm). No balkanization please! (especially when it comes to smaller languages!) Arbeo 17:08, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
      • Yes, there is a unified written form which can be applied to all dialects except those of the Northern Isles. Apart from them, one Scots site can cover all dialects including Ulster since, although pronunciations, and to a lesser extent vocabulary, differ from one dialect to another, there is a standardised spelling (cf the Scottish National Dictionary) although it's not widely known owing to lack of Scots education in schools. -- Derek Ross 07:47, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
        • Thanks for constructing the (boring) temporary site. If you are a developer or if you know one, you could get them (when they're ready) to set up camp at sco.wikipedia.org. Scott Gall 07:37, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC) PS: Not now, but when they're ready.
          • Scott, I think you're supposed to wait until five people have given their support. I think Scots is more of a pidgin/creole - we already have a project in Tok Pisin, which is a creole. NazismIsntCool 19:45, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • It certainly isn't. It's is either a group of coherent (native!) English dialects or a sister language of English, not a bastard child. Caesarion 20:09, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • English can be considered a 14th century creole of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, and Scots came from similar roots to English but with different proportions in the mix, so I suppose that it's not unreasonable to call both languages creoles. -- Derek Ross 05:40, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
            • Indeed. Scots is not a creole. English indeed could be considered a creole (anyone who has seen Old English will know why). Not jsut because it is a mixture, but because the typical grammatical simplification that occurs in creoles occurred in English too (it lost almsot all inflections, gender, the dual number etc). BryanAJParry 19th May
    • I do wish there was some sign that this scots wiki will get made. There has been a request to delete the "Scotland" article which I translated from English to Scots and put in the Scots test wiki; I ask ye, what is the point of these test wikis if not to make a mock version of the full-blown wiki?? BryanAJParry
      • Oh my God!! Now someone has totally destroyed the test wiki ("Aphaia"). Now, I know anyone can edit anything, but this is obscene. How dare this user delete everything we've done at the scots testwiki. He not only deleted the Scots article, but he has also deleted much of the talk we had about what the wiki should be like when made. I am extremely angry.
      • It was extremely rude but it's not as bad as it looks. I'll sort it out -- that's the good thing about a wiki ;-) I can understand your anger but I'm afraid that you'll have to develop a thick skin to work on Wikimedia projects. It's either that or burst a lot of bloodvessels, <grin>. We do have some high level support and it is just a demo which we would have to throw away anyway, so don't let it get you down. Cheers -- Derek Ross 02:48, 20 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Okay, it's all back to the way it was apart from the Rfd notice which will be taken down within a few days once the Rfd process has run its course. No need to worry, so let's get back to business. I recommend that we concentrate on producing the "must have" pages like "Foo tae edit a page", "Wikipedia:Aboot" or "Wikipedia:Village Pump" rather than encyclopedic content. Read Help:How to start a new Wikipedia for a list of things that need doing. Some of them only make sense once sco.wikipedia.org has been created but others can be done now, so let's do those that we can. As for spelling and grammar, I'm not too worried about it right now. Don't get me wrong -- I think that a standardised spelling and grammar is essential and should be based on the work which the wider Scots language community has already done -- but I don't think that it should be a priority for us at the moment. There are always folk like me that'll come along afterwards and copyedit spelling and grammar. For this demo, Wikipedia-related content is more important. So fa tae, chiels. -- Derek Ross 15:43, 20 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • Good idea, Derek. In the discussion part of the Scots metawiki, I'ld appreciate you posting a list of what you think needs doing. :D BryanAJParry
      • I wonder about the value of spending time translating things like "how to edit a page" instead of writing encyclopaedic content. While in an ideal world all these things - help pages, policy documents etc - would exist in Scots, you could end up with the extensive infrastructure needed to produce an encyclopaedia but very little in the way of actual articles. Since it's easy for Scots speakers to read all the relevant documents in English, if I was overseeing this project I would encourage as a priority the writing of really good quality articles on initial core subjects like "Scotland", "Scots language", "History of Scotland", some Scottish cities and all the rest of it. While you're doing this I should think the most important thing in the way of infrastructure would be to translate the interface so the wiki looks nice and professional to the casual reader, without having all English words in the sidebar etc. Community pages like the village pump will write themselves - all that's needed is a nice header or something. Putting lengthy policy guides into Scots is a labour-intensive business that won't show any immediate benefits in terms of the number of good articles available to readers. Quite some time ago now I came across the Cornish wiki, which had been set up but had sat there for months with no articles, and one of the things I recommended to get it started was to try and write an article on every village in Cornwall, so that in that specialist area coverage was better than the English Wikipedia. I still think that's good advice. If you can write featured-quality articles on Scottish towns, aspects of Scottish culture, or Scots literature, people will follow the interwiki link from basic stubs on en: and be really impressed by how much better the coverage is in Scots. I think this will get people excited about the Scots wiki in a way that behind-the-scenes instructional pages they can read in English anyway won't. Imagine also something like this: a nuclear physicist starts writing excellent content on the Scots wiki, and hence the whole thing becomes known amongst the nuclear physics people on en: and elsewhere as the place to go for good content to translate. Since the creation of a several-hundered-thousand-article general encyclopaedia from scratch is quite a challenge, concentrating on doing specialised topics really well seems a good way to get started and establish a reputation. The ones that will be of immediate interest to readers will, I suspect, relate to Scotland and the Scots language. My two pennorth on the matter! Trilobite 16:55, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You may well be right, Trilobite, and I think that what you say is good advice for any small Wikipedia. However we still haven't even got that far yet. At the moemnt we just need a small number of pages to demonstrate commitment so that we can actually get sco.wikipedia.org set up. Some of them should be content articles and some should be "how to" pages. In particular we need the "Whit wey tae edit a page" page, the "Whit Wikipaedia isnae", "Whit NPOV is", "Copyricht" and "Spellin an grammar" policy pages, so that new contributors can learn the type of writing that Wikipedia needs. Now there's little doubt that they could learn all of that apart from the spelling/grammar from the corresponding English Wikipedia pages since we can guarantee that all Scots speakers can read English even if they don't speak it but I think that these pages are the minimum requirement for a self contained Wikipedia and that it's important to include them to show that we're doing a proper job. By all means make the other 15-20 articles with particular relevance to Scots. Once we have done all that we should be in a very good position to ask when sco.wikipedia.org is going to be configured. -- Derek Ross 23:40, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Another REALLY good book for learning Scots is "Scots Language Learner", L. Colin Wilson, from Luath Press (2003) ISBN: 0-946487-91-X BryanAJParry

Here is a link to a Doric Scots Group with video's on learning Doric--http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=337966745545&ref=ts