IJzeren Jan

Translations

I don't know most of the languages well enough to verify the accuracy of your translations, but the presence of one obvious ringer calls all the others into question. Why should we keep all those translations, if we can't trust that you know what you're doing?

Let me ask you: where are you getting your translations? Whenever I see someone add translations in dozens of languages- including some pretty obscure ones- that makes me suspicious that they're blindly copying them from some other source. When those translations include a modern term in a language that's been dead for upwards of a thousand years, that confirms for me that something is seriously wrong.

If a language hasn't had any speakers for centuries, we don't allow terms made up by modern people- no matter how well they know the language. Such terms really belong to a constructed language based on a reconstruction of the old language, not to the language in question.

If you've been getting translations from other Wiktionaries and from Wikipedias, you should know that we don't accept those as sources, since we don't know where they got their information. Wikipedias are particularly dangerous, because people make up terms all the time: there may not be a term in the language yet for something they want to write about, or they may not know the right term if it does exist.

Please read our Criteria for inclusion to get an idea of our standards. If you aren't absolutely sure that a term would meet those requirements, don't add it as a translation.

You may think that you're helping by adding translations that you haven't checked, but what you're really doing is forcing someone else to verify your edits. There aren't many people who know some of these languages, and their time would be better spent creating their own entries and adding their own translations. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:53, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

First of all, please do not attach too much value to my Babel boxes. Level 1 means that I have actually learned a language, I just don't use it frequently and it would take quite an effort on my part to write a decent article in it. For example, Ancient Greek is a language I've learned at school for five years, but I've forgotten much of it. There are dozens of other languages I have studied to some degree. I hate it to show off, but for example, I have a basic knowledge of almost all Slavic languages and I am fully accustomed to reading articles and books in them, it's just that I'd have serious difficulties with using them actively. Which, obviously, does not mean that I don't know them at all! Likewise, I am quite familiar with Luxemburgish, but even though I have lived in Luxemburg for two years, I couldn't really speak or write in it without making a lot of mistakes.

Secondly, I have spent many years doing extensive research in this particular field, so obviously I know the name of the subject even in languages I don't know well. Of course, it is not a topic written about in dozens of languages on a daily base, so in some cases it's just a matter of a few occurrences.

In any case, I can following your reasoning about Old Church Slavonic. My mistake! Don't worry, I won't be adding Anglo-Saxon, Ancient Greek or Gothic to the mix...

As for the "please verify" you've added:

• I can assure you that I am 200% sure about the Slavic languages.
• In German, it's just that "Slavisch" and "Slawisch" are both in use, so logically, the same goes for "Interslavisch" and "Interslawisch". I've seen both used in literature.
• I don't know Azerbaijani, but I've found "ümumslavyan" used on the Internet several times. The Cyrillic transliteration, I admit, is of my own doing (just because transliteration is a hobby of mine).
• I don't really know Spanish either, but I've found "intereslavo" in several places. Same goes for Italian "interslavo", Hungarian "interszláv" and Greek "διασλαβικός".
• Irish, Hindi, Marathi and Chinese seem to be Wikipedia only. In these and a few other cases verification might be useful.

Does that more or less answer your questions and/or address you concerns?

Best regards, IJzeren Jan (talk) 03:13, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

CFI for appendix-only conlangs

Here's a notification that a CFI for appendix-only conlangs has passed and can be implemented in upcoming months. I'd like to enquire how you feel about the CFI and whether you would propose any changes. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 18:10, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the notification! However, since the vote has already passed, I guess there's little I can add to the discussion. For the record, I think the change is clearly an improvement, which, however, doesn't mean I like the current version. In my opinion, it is stupid to list languages instead of criteria. And this particular list is typically a list of those constructed languages that were considered important in the 1990s, in other words, totally dated. Novial, for example, is basically a one-man project that never had much success at all, and it might be argued that more recent projects like Lingua Franca Nova and – especially – Lojban are a lot more deserving of a place on the list. However, instead of talking about individual languages, it would be a lot wiser to establish some objective criteria. For example, whether a language has an ISO 639-3 code, or whether a language has its own Wikipedia edition. That last criterion might even be more workable. Currently, nine languages have their own Wikipedia: Esperanto, Volapük, Interlingua, Ido, Interlingue, Novial, Lojban, Lingua Franca Nova, Kotava). I guess adding Lojban, LFN and Kotava to the list of language that are not excluded wouldn't hurt anybody. IJzeren Jan (talk) 22:20, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to ask about your opinion about the list of mainspace conlangs, but specifically your opinion about how the criteria are going to affect languages that are in the appendix. The list of mainspace conlangs is likely to change in the future, because Novial and Occidental honestly don't have large corpora. (I expect that we will soon end up at the stable end point of only allowing Esperanto, Ido, Volapük and Interlingua in the mainspace, because it is possible to durably attest thousands of words in these languages.) There are already more conlangs in the appendix than there are in the mainspace and in the future there might well be more conlang content in the appendix. It is important that there are criteria that prevent users from adding their own inventions to the appendix languages. You will need durable quotations or mentions for that (the latter are only allowed for limited-documentation languages in the mainspace). ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 09:21, 6 February 2021 (UTC)