Re: Invitation to new 'conlang' wiki

Hi all,

On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Jim Henry wrote:
>
> On 7/10/06, Herman Miller wrote:
> > From:         Paul Bennett
> >  >I'd suggest that someone or ones with a stern hand but a fair eye go
> >  >over the extant conlang Wikis, and combine them into a single,
slightly
> >  >more de-jure, source. I suspect it would be a legthy as well as
> >  >difficult task, though. I suggest instead that we hold some kind of
> >  >referendum to determine our preferred Wiki (or indeed whether a
unified
> >  >Wiki is desirable), and each take responsibility to move our own
> >  >content to a unified new home, if needed.
> >  >
> >  >Alternatively, the process could probably be automated with wget,
> >  >expect, and perl, though that might be a nightmare to actually
> >  >implement.
> >
> > Any Wiki that accepts Unicode characters (particularly IPA) would be
> > acceptable. Some of the Wikis I've seen didn't handle Unicode characters
> > properly or at all in the past. They may have improved since then. But
> > ASCII is such a severe limitation for language-related pages.
>
> The Conlang Wikia ( http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page )
> is also run on MediaWiki, so I reckon it should handle Unicode -
> though I am not sure.  It hosts a list of derivational methods and a
> list of self-segregating morphology methods, along with information
> on a number of specific conlangs (including, especially, conlang
> articles that got deleted from Wikipedia).
I'm not at all fussed by the existence of other 'conlang'
wikis anywhere, and certainly didn't mean to steal anyone's
thunder!  It's just that I needed a name, and since I intend
to use the wiki to describe more than one of my conlangs
AND would enjoy other people contributing theirs, I couldn't
name it for just one of them, NOR for myself without causing
some confusion.  However, I do see that this may have created
some confusion elsewhere!  I don't know whether I can easily
rename my PBwiki, tho; nor to what I should rename it, if I can.

IMO, having several distinct, and even distinctive, wikis
available for the world to tap into conlanging has to be
A Good Thing.  The more the merrier, I say.  Whilst there
will inevitably be overlap, adding redundancy and capacity
can only make our collective enterprise more robust.  I've
had a quick look at frath, and can see it's already large
and well-resourced.

I appreciate the point made about handling Unicode.  Some
time ago, I'd already chickened out of this problem by
deliberately documenting my conlangs only in CXS.  However,
I do use the US-International keyboard in Windows XP,
routinely and everyday, since it supports most West European
languages very well indeed.  I imagine it's only a matter of
time before the majority of PC users do have and routinely
use a keyboard with at least similar capabilities, which will of
course force software and service vendors to support their
use; the logical implementation will be Unicode.  For the
moment, I'm not particularly worried by its lack, since the
CXS and similar schemes already allow much more flexibility
than spelling systems in which case was not significant.

On balance, I don't believe that "a unified Wiki is desirable",
to answer Paul's question.  There will naturally be wikis with
more or less status and visibility.  IMO, competition between
the big players can only be good.  Meanwhile, my little wiki
has much more modest aims.

Finally, may I repeat my request for comments on the
description of Uiama?  eg: What could be clearer?  What
haven't I covered?  Would you like to be able to speak
or sing it? :-)

Regards,
Yahya

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