Wednesday, November 03, 2010

A case for a #Wikisource in #Sanskrit

Sanskrit as a language is comparable to Latin and less so Old Greek. It is of immense cultural importance to the culture of India. There are a few people who speak Sanskrit as their mother tongue but this is less relevant compared to its importance as a language for source material.

There is a request for a Sanskrit Wikisource and some well respected Wikipedians urge the language committee to allow for its creation and wave the requirement for a full localisation in Sanskrit.

I am happy to support this request because we would allow for a dead language without localisation. Sanskrit is important for the whole of the Indian community; I believe that this will stimulate all the projects in languages of the Indian subcontinent. I am happy for the language committee to make an exception to the rule without changing the rules.

I hate complicated rules. The language committee contains capable and competent people, they are well able to consider situations where it makes sense to ignore the rules.
Thanks,
       GerardM

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think this is a typical case where rules have to be bent and not broken. Because Sanskrit is a dead language, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make the effort of translating a user interface in it. However, there may be a widely spoken language in the area where Sanskrit is important as a historical language, for which the localisation requirement could be set.

GerardM said...

Sanskrit is for instance relevant to people who also know Malayalam. That language is well covered.. It would be nice when Hindi was as good.
Thanks,
GerardM

Pathoschild said...

What rule prevents a Sanskrit Wikisource? The policy specifically states that "Wikisource wikis are allowed in languages with no native speakers".

GerardM said...

There are a few thousand native speakers of the Sanskrit language. This is something we should ignore for once.

Anonymous said...

@Pathoschild: No one here said where that a Sanskrit WikiSource would be out of the question. Why bring that up?