Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

Hallo!

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:00:26 -0800, Sai Emrys wrote:

> Right now, the conlang community as a whole is split up into many separate
> fora.
>
> [list of fora snup]
>
> Now, I can fully understand that in some cases this has been necessary
> from the perspective of keeping discussion topical and to keep people
> from butting heads too much (auxlang evangelism comes to mind as one
> very easy flamewar-starter). I can also completely understand the
> different utility, and mood, created by different fora types.
Right.  Most of the fora you listed have pretty good reasons to be.
I doubt that many people, for instance, would like to have the
CONLANG/AUXLANG split been undone.  Most artlangers and engelangers
don't show the least desire to wade through 100-odd auxlang advocacy
posts each day.  Many of the fora you listed are dedicated to
specific conlangs or conworlds, and serve to discuss particular
matters which do not interest the majority of the conlang community
much.

There are, however, a few unnecessary ones, which were set up
even though serviceable alternatives existed, either because the
people who set them up weren't informed about the prior existence
of suitable fora, or because of egocentrism: some people simply
wish to have a forum they OWN.

Often, the audiences overlap.  There is hardly anyone on the CBB
who is not also on the ZBB.  The CONLANG and ZBB communities
also overlap to some degree, but most CONLANG members are not on
the ZBB and most ZBB members are not on CONLANG.  Nevertheless,
while I think the CBB hardly serves a purpose not served
adequately by the ZBB, I wouldn't say that the ZBB itself was
superfluous.  It started as a forum dedicated to Mark Rosenfelder's
conworld, and was later reformed into a general conlang/conworld
forum because most of the people on it had their own conworlds
and conlangs going and wished to discuss them.  What can be
observed now is that a division of labour between CONLANG and
ZBB is gradually developing, with CONLANG becoming a forum for
engelangers, and ZBB a forum for naturalistic artlangers and
conworlders.

> However, it seems to me that this degree of splitting is both
> technically and socially suboptimal.
>
> Our community - and here I speak of all online conlangers worldwide,
> of whatever stripe - is not that large; on the whole, we are probably
> a couple thousand people, and a couple hundred who are active. This
> splitting, IME, results in simply many small, poorly organized, and
> fragile fora, that die as soon as the originator loses the energy to
> do it... which always does happen sooner or later.
It is true that the international conlanging community is small
- but nevertheless, it is extremely heterogenous.  There is not
much a Lojbanist and a Klingonist have to discuss with each other;
most artlangers don't want to be molested with the often inflammtory
discussion about the optimal international auxiliary language; etc.
The diversity of online conlanging communities is not so much a flaw
as it is a virtue.  Everyone can pick the community which caters
best to his interests.  If all of them were amalgamated into a
single huge all-encompassing conlang community, one would get a
monster with thousands of posts every day, of which hardly anyone
would want to read even a tenth of them.  Such a forum would have
to be divided into subfora - but then we can just as well leave
everything as it is today.

> I think that this is a shame, because many such projects that have
> died for lack of collaboration have been admirable - especially wikis
> (which tend towards stubhood) and media (which die once the originator
> can't come up with all the content themselves).
Sure, many promising projects have failed - I know that too well
because one of the casualties, the League of Lost Languages, was
started by me.  (Well, the LLL is only as dead as its members
consider it to be, but it hasn't seen much activity lately.)

> What I would like to see is for these communities to come together
> into basically one central, multifaceted site - keep the diversity of
> list / BB / wiki / IRC / media / IRL formats perhaps if necessary
> (though I'm unconvinced that the list/BB split is really necessary),
Some people prefer mailing lists, other prefer BBs.  It's a different
style of communication.

> but make it all coherent, in the same place, and serving the needs of
> all the community rather than having each subgroup split off because
> some (valid and meetable) need isn't handled.
What are the needs of "all the community"?  The diversity among
conlangers is HUGE, and the things they are interested in are
very, very diverse.  It is true that this diversity sometimes
shades into sectarianism (especially among auxlangers), which
is unfortunate; but diversity is a virtue, not a fault, and
a diverse scene calls for a diversity of fora.  There are many,
many issues of interest only to a subset of conlangers, far
more than ones of interest to every conlanger in the world.

> Relatedly, I would like to see this site have a way for conlangers to
> describe their languages with input (as desired) from others, using
> templates worked on collaboratively; to host their own essays and
> such, with control over their own content; etc.
I.e., a wiki dedicated to conlangs.  In my opinion, FrathWiki,
KneeQuickie and Conlang Wikia (and many of the smaller wikis which
exist besides them) could indeed be merged into one wiki.

> The benefit I see from boils down to essentially two things: First, on
> the small level, individual projects would get more attention when
> there are more eyes looking and more organization (like tagging,
> sorting, etc) to make it easy for them to be found.
Sure; but most projects interest only a fraction of all conlangers.

>       Second, on the
> large level, projects that *need* collaboration - like media (whether
> podcast, journal, or otherwise) - would be able to get and sustain it
> more easily, thus providing a kind of interaction and
> bringing-together element that can't normally be done otherwise.
What I would consider useful is a common "starting point" or "meta-site"
which links to the various communities that exist on the Net, so that
every conlanger can see what exists and pick the communities which
serve his interests best.  But that's about all of it.  Such a site
would best be done as a wiki, preferably the "unified conlang wiki"
I suggested two paragraphs further above, with a link from the
Wikipedia conlang portal.

> To be perfectly clear, I personally desire no control of this, and I
> fully recognize that it is technologically nontrivial. To make it
> happen would require wide consensus and collaboration, both among
> normal conlangers and siteops - and across what are currently
> segregated fora.
Yes.

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