Re: Langmaker and FrathWiki (was Re: Wikipedia:Verifiability - Mailing lists as sources)

On 2/28/08, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> The actual documentation doesn't really need a "critical mass", only the
> efforts of the creator...
Sorry for being unclear. I was referring only to *sites/projects*
needing a critical mass of *people*.

> (You do talk about this stuff on the ZBB too, do you? I haven't visited
> there in a while.)
Honestly? Not nearly as often.

> I don't really see the logic in cataloging all scribbled-up stubs of a
> language on FrathWiki at LangMaker, either. You wouldn't want my
> grammar-less phonology sketches polluting the list, would you? :)
Why not? So long as they are properly categorized *as* sketches, and
we have some more refined lists of essentially the "most notable"
conlangs being referred to in main articles.

But I see no harm in including everything if it's handled right.

The only issue  I see is that you might have name collisions, as Rick
pointed out, but this can be handled with disambiguation pages. I
don't believe there are really likely to be a large enough number that
this would cause a problem normally.

On 2/28/08, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> What you say is Good and True, *except* that both Langmaker
> and FrathWiki have been around for years, and merging them
> and/or start a new site which would wholly or partly
> replace them would require the agreement and cooperation of
> a lot of people -- essentially everybody who have ever
> contributed to either of the existing sites --,
Why?

As far as I can tell, it would require the cooperation of a) the
siteops and b) a handful of people dedicated enough to do the work.
IME it's usually <6 people total who do the majority of it.

Then you just point people to the new place of their content
(hopefully with all previous links automagically redirecting one
there) and they can keep working on it as ever, 'cept now with a bit
more colocation and better indexing. (Content you can't find isn't
useful content.)

> If the old sites still exist there
> will inevitably come people along and add content to them
> being unaware of the new site.
If the old sites still exist (as other than redirects), than it was a
'port not a merge. I'm only recommending an actual merge.

> If enough people are
> interested in doing such a projectI might definitely open
> conlang.se for it.
And I think we could do e.g. wiki.conlang.org.

Though again there's nothing to prevent multipe names for the same thing.

> But what to call it, as Conlang Wiki is
> already taken. Conlang index?
Would Conlang Wiki join in the merge? (I see no reason not to...)

If yes why not just keep it called that? Seems the simplest possible name.

On 2/28/08, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> Or conlang.org since I see Sai owns it.
I don't - David G. Durand does. But he has kindly offered to transfer
it to the Language Creation Society once we get fully tax-exempt.

> Is it possible to have subdomains of the same domain on different servers?
Absolutely.

On 2/28/08, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
> > Whereas if they're in the same place, all languages could more readily
> > get the a good, thorough treatment.
>
> But will they?
I didn't say "will", I said "[can] more readily". :-P

Of course not everything will get covered. The question is just which
is *more likely* to get it done.

> It would indeed be nice to have encyclopedic articles on conlangs
> written by someone else than the authors of the languages; Wikipedia
> frowns on articles people write about their own projects for good
> reasons. The problem, of course, is that with many conlangs, the
> author is the only one who knows the language well enough to write
> an encyclopedic article on it :) However, if the language is
> published, one can use the published material as source material
> for a third-party article.
Not necessarily.

The author is indeed (usually) the only one able to write Grammar and
Vocab pages (and certainly Purpose).

But anyone who reads *those* (i.e. the primary sources) can write an
encyclopedic aritcle.

And sometimes third parties can look at the author's grammar and
correct them - e.g. it's been mentioned to me more than once that
sometimes people will claim that their language does x when if you
look at the corpus it clearly doesn't, or at least that that is a very
tenuous analysis compared to some other one. IMO that's valuable
feedback for a conlanger to get.

> > And that's the other reason not to separate it. If it's all in one
> > place, then you can much more easily get the critical mass (as it
> > were) of people needed to make it self-sustaining. If it's separated,
> > then it gets too fragile and dependent on individuals who will
> > inevitably get overwhelmed by other things in life from time to time.
>
> I don't see how a merger will change this.
Psychology.

Essentially people have a (soft) limit to the number of entities they
can viably contribute to. When it's scattered, those are all
individual separate things.

You won't get as many people working on site A and site B as on
section A and section B of the same site - even if A & B are
functionally identical.

Plus there's overhead - crosslinking, maintaining cross-site
consistency, duplication of information, etc etc.

I've suggested ways in which merger would be beneficial.

Can you suggest ways in which keeping them separate would be beneficial?

> What makes sense to me is to start with Langmaker, turn it
> into a collaborative project,
It is - it's a wiki. A poorly maintained one.

> and add more information (such as typological data)
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_language

- Sai

On 2/28/08, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:16:08 -0800, Sai Emrys wrote:
>
> > FWIW IMO: Essentially, registry, encyclopedia, and primer are indeed
> > different *functions*, but they need not be different *sites*, and
> > making them the latter would cause stubbing and other problems.
>
> Sure.  They need not be on different sites - but they also need not
> be on the same site if they are well-linked to each other.
>
> > Whereas if they're in the same place, all languages could more readily
> > get the a good, thorough treatment.
>
> But will they?
>
> > The main article could be, essentially, Wikipedia-ish (if it worked
> > :|) NPOV, third person descriptions. Subpages from that could be the
> > full first-person elaboration and showcase, in some semi-templated
> > form so that it's consistent and well-described.
>
> It would indeed be nice to have encyclopedic articles on conlangs
> written by someone else than the authors of the languages; Wikipedia
> frowns on articles people write about their own projects for good
> reasons.  The problem, of course, is that with many conlangs, the
> author is the only one who knows the language well enough to write
> an encyclopedic article on it :)  However, if the language is
> published, one can use the published material as source material
> for a third-party article.
>
> > And that's the other reason not to separate it. If it's all in one
> > place, then you can much more easily get the critical mass (as it
> > were) of people needed to make it self-sustaining. If it's separated,
> > then it gets too fragile and dependent on individuals who will
> > inevitably get overwhelmed by other things in life from time to time.
>
> I don't see how a merger will change this.
>
> > I think we all agree that Jeffrey's done an awesome job. His work
> > should be preserved and merged. But it shouldn't *rely* on him to
> > continue to be a valuable (and fresh) resource.
>
> Yep.  Langmaker needs more contributors.
>
> On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:08:31 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>
> > What you say is Good and True, *except* that both Langmaker
> > and FrathWiki have been around for years, and merging them
> > and/or start a new site which would wholly or partly
> > replace them would require the agreement and cooperation of
> > a lot of people -- essentially everybody who have ever
> > contributed to either of the existing sites --, while in
> > reality a large segment wouldn't bother, and another
> > segment would be upset. If the old sites still exist there
> > will inevitably come people along and add content to them
> > being unaware of the new site.
> >
> > Still it could be done with a lot of work, a lot of
> > canvassing, the Preloader extension and a lot of scary
> > transclusions/soft redirects. If enough people are
> > interested in doing such a projectI might definitely open
> > conlang.se for it.
>
> What makes sense to me is to start with Langmaker, turn it
> into a collaborative project, and add more information (such
> as typological data) to the Langmaker records.  Maybe even
> a grammar sketch if there is none on a public web site already
> or what is already there is too messy to be useful as a work
> of reference.
>
> >      But what to call it, as Conlang Wiki is
> > already taken. Conlang index? (Or Conlang windex as in
> > Conlang clearinghouse? :-)
>
> I don't know.  "Conlang Index" would be good.
>
> > FrathWiki could clearly live on as a more informal site for
> > presentation and self-expression, but Langmaker would
> > essentially be eclipsed by such a new project, which could
> > upset or relieve the people involved with Langmaker,
> > depending.
>
> Yes.
>
> On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:38:38 -0500, Jim Henry wrote:
>
> > Where are the encyclopedic articles on the art of conlanging
> > at FrathWiki?  There are a few such articles linked from the main
> > page at http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, but I can't
> > easily find such articles, if they exist, on FrathWiki.
>
> There admittely aren't many.  I was speaking more of what could be
> than what actually is.  A few linguistics articles have been copied
> from Wikipedia, and a couple of others written specifically for
> FrathWiki, but they are indeed few and poorly indexed.
>
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