15/11/2007 [Legacy]
The Dnghu Group is taking over the administration of Iventia.com, a website for Spanish minority languages and historical dialects, from Academia Biblos. It will become a website for free portals in different minority languages, hosted specifically at Dnghu’s web servers. We try to balance our probable decision to create a stronger (political) movement for EU linguistic and political unification, Oinion.
The main aim is to offer what Wikipedia can’t: unified and flexible free web portals, prepared to host almost all kinds of knowledge, whether original or not. Since the first Wikipedias were published in minority languages, it was obviously wrong to impose the same firm objective of the English version (strict encyclopedic knowledge), for Wikis whose real objective is to promote the language itself.
Thus, many minority languages Wikis are stuck between little encyclopedic knowledge – a few science articles written in languages which don’t even have an official orthography – and some articles which are only of interest to those who want to speak the language: its grammatical features, proposed orthography, the places where it is or was spoken, etc. These ‘encyclopedic’ articles usually stop in some hundreds, because nobody can post their own works.
Which language should have an Iventia portal instead of a Wikipedia is a matter of choice: the Catalan language, for example, is enough known, officially regulated and spoken to have its own free online encyclopedia with Wikimedia. The revived Prussian language, on the other hand, clearly shouldn’t, as there is no official written standard, only a few can speak it, and only encyclopedic articles can’t deal with what the revival project needs. For languages and dialects in between, a person willing to create a flexible portal will be able to request one.
The following steps have been – or are being – taken to remodel Iventia, to clearly complement Wikipedia:
- More Flexibility: it will not host only encyclopedic knowledge. Other original works (such as grammars, orthography, linguistic articles) can be posted and, when popular, promoted as featured content of the Wiki.
- Licensing Freedom: the content is licensed GFDL, and thus it can be translated directly from the Wikimedia projects, but Creative Commons licences can also be used if an author wants to publish original works under more restrictive licenses.
- Integration: News, articles and original research and texts can be published in the same Wiki website, and promoted to the frontpage.