Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages

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This WikiProject aims primarily to provide a consistent treatment of each human language on Wikipedia. Many languages already have extensive pages, and the systematic information on those pages is not presented in a consistent way. The purpose of this WikiProject is to present that information consistently, and to ensure that each of the major areas is covered at least briefly for each language.

These are only suggestions, things to give you focus and to get you going, and you shouldn't feel obligated in the least to follow them. However, try to stick to the format for the Infobox for each language. See the template for an example Infobox.

The easiest way to get started writing for a language that doesn't already have an article or to convert an article to the WikiProject format is to start with the template.

Index · Statistics · Log
Language articles by quality and importance
Quality Importance
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
Featured article FA 2 2 2 6
A-Class article A 1 1
GA 1 6 1 5 13
B 10 17 28 12 21 88
C 51 80 91 78 211 511
Start 11 179 129 246 1,131 1,696
Stub 1 204 60 848 5,074 6,187
List 4 10 10 8 78 110
Book 1 1
Category 1 399 400
Disambig 8 8
File 6 6
Portal 2 2
Project 4 4
Redirect 1 31 32
Template 1 168 169
Assessed 76 492 320 1,204 627 6,515 9,234
Unassessed 19 19
Total 76 492 320 1,204 627 6,534 9,253
WikiWork factors (?) ω = 700447941000000000047,941 Ω = 5.64

Contents

Related WikiProjects [edit]

This WikiProject is a descendant of WikiProject Linguistics. It has five descendant WikiProjects of its own:

Project volunteers [edit]

If you'd like to help out, be contacted by others interested in this WikiProject's subject, and receive task assignments and project-related updates on your talk page, please add your name here:

Structure [edit]

Most language articles should be on a page titled XXX language. Reasons for this recommendation:

  1. Ambiguity. While some language have special forms that refer unambiguously to the language, English is inherently ambiguous about language names. Having a standard of "XXX language" ensures that it's always unambiguous. There is always the possibility of "XXX literature", "XXX grammar", but these cannot be referred to simply as "XXX", and so are not a reason for disambiguation.
  2. Precedent. This is how Encyclopædia Britannica and many other English-language encyclopedias name their articles.
Please note that when there is nothing to disambiguate a language name from, such as Hindi, Esperanto or Inuktitut, there is no need for the "language". See Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Languages, both spoken and programming and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages) for the relevant naming policy.

Whether the varieties of Arabic and Chinese should be called "languages" or "dialects" continues to be a highly controversial issue. The current convention is: use NAME + Arabic for Arabic varieties (e.g. Egyptian Arabic) and NAME + Chinese for Chinese varieties (e.g. Mandarin Chinese). Infoboxes are put at both Arabic language and Chinese language and at their first-level subdivisions.

Even in cases in which there is a consensus that varieties of a language have a dialect status, the number and divisions between such dialects are often vaguely-defined, and controversies exist among dialectologists over whether certain varieties should be treated in a unified way or are best understood as separate though related varieties. Separate articles should only be written on varieties (e.g., Estuary English) or related groups of varieties (e.g., Hispanic English) that have been well-enough studied by linguists that at least a minimal body of literature exists about that variety or group of varieties, as a distinct dialect or group of dialects. Phonological, morphosyntactic, or lexical variation that may be considered subdialectal should be noted as "differences within X dialect,", where X is a dialect as discussed in the relevant literature. Controversies over dialect status can be noted in articles as such, but should also be based on citable work. Names used to refer to that dialect in the title should be preferred over folk-linguistic terms (e.g., Inland North versus Midwestern Accent).

Open tasks [edit]

Updates [edit]

  • Category:Language articles with speaker number undated should be completed so the reader knows how old the data is. This should probably be part of a community effort to update all articles to E17; it's too much for any one person. (Population updates require a guideline: you can't add 2 million and 30,000 to get 2,030,000 the way Ethnologue does, especially since the 2 million may actually have been an estimate of 1–3 million in their source, so we need to redo their arithmatic. Also, in E17 the Hindi languages go by census data, which is completely off: much of each population is missing because they counted themselves as Hindi speakers. (The census recognizes this in its presentation, but that nuance is lost in the Ethnologue report.) And it's meaningless to add together speaker data taken decades apart in fast-growing or shrinking populations. Etc.)

Automating the infobox [edit]

I really thought it was amazing how the Template:Automatic taxobox can take just a genus/species and give all of the other taxonomy. We could create something similar that shows the precursor languages of any language inserted. I would definitely be willing to do the coding. —Preceding signed comment added by Nicky Nouse (talk • contribs • wikia) 01:21, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
I've always thought this would be a good idea. It would make maintenance and updating classifications much easier. But there have been some concerns with the server load of the bio template. I don't know the details, but if we do do this, IMO it should be a community project. — kwami (talk) 05:11, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

[I've since tried following up with Nicky Nouse, but got no response. — kwami (talk) 03:21, 6 November 2012 (UTC)]

Articles needing help / input request [edit]

Articles to be created [edit]

Futher information: Language names and ISO codes in Ethnologue 17; Ethnologue 16; Ethnologue 14 and 15; Ethnologue 13; Ethnologue 12; Ruhlen (1987); Voegelin (1977); AIATSIS

The following list started as a compilation of the red links in our language-family articles. It was expanded with ISO languages (often unclassified or undocumented) that were not listed on WP, and old SIL names that have no article to direct to. In the case of extinct undocumented languages, it may not be worth creating an article, in which case a rd. might be made to the family article and the red link removed from it. As of Mar 2013, nearly all ISO names have articles, though not always one-to-one; those which remain are not notable, scarcely attested, or have no info. There are a thousand red Voegelin (1977) names, though most should probably be simple redirects.

The lists below do not include many cases where ISO codes have been consolidated into a single language, such as Fulani, Zhuang, and Mazatec.

Red links [edit]
Voegelin (1977): 1,800 unlinked names, mostly spelling variants and alt names of languages listed in Ethnologue. Just a matter of going through them!
Cases to track [edit]
Identity suspect
vgr, nkd, nmj, nsc, Sotatipo, Kali, Lui, Guthrie languages marked [§] & Mangala, Pasto (wrong ISO?), Kanamarí (contradicted by E17)

Requests for expansion [edit]

Images for articles in Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of languages.

2013 [edit]

Requests for attention [edit]

See also: Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Linguistics
Tagged categories
Category:Articles lacking sources
  • 2004–2012:(only articles with 'language', 'dialect', 'creole', or 'pidgin' in name are included; distilled from an insane number of articles)

Afrikaans (Eastern Cape dialect), Afrikaans (Northern Cape dialect), Brajavali language, Cayman Creole, Central Franconian dialects, Ceylon Dutch creole, Chipilo Venetian dialect, Comasco-Lecchese dialects, Debar dialect, Eastphalian dialect, Fornes dialects, German dialects, Gipuzkoan dialect, Hamburgisch dialect, Han'er language, Harbin dialect, Kfar Kama Adyghe dialect, Kurdish dialects, Lower Navarrese dialect, Luoyang dialect, Mango dialect, Manningham dialect, Oldenburg dialect, Orsamål dialect, Pavese dialect, Persian dialects in Khuzestan, Pyongan dialect, Qihai dialect, Qormi dialect, Reka dialect, Rio Abajo Creole, Ruian dialect, Sabino dialect, Sognamål dialect, Strumica dialect, Sutsilvan dialects (Romansh), Thanjavur Marathi dialect, Tianjin dialect, Transylvanian Saxon dialect, Upper Navarrese dialect, Weihai dialect, West Semitic languages, Western Brythonic dialect, Whulshootseed dialect, Żejtun dialect, Ripuarian language, Japhetic languages

Manual requests

(no article Ashéninka people; Keres functions as the lang article but reads as a family article)

Articles proposed for deletion [edit]

including WP:AFD, WP:PROD and other processes

Bot requests [edit]

The following bot requests aren't going anywhere, and could use input.

  • Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_48#Removing_flag_templates_from_infoboxes
  • Clean up info boxes
    • Add blank date=, ref=, and ethnicity= to all articles [and state + region as minor change]
    • Arrange infobox fields per their order in the documentation
    • tag all duplicate fields (even if the second one is empty) with an error category for manual review. (If the first is empty, just delete)
    • delete unsupported fields if empty, tag for review if not
    • move 'citation needed' from speakers= to ref=
    • check that there are no gaps in fam#, dia#, lc# etc. that would cause subsequent entries to fail to display [checked fam, dia, lc, ld, stand, but not linglist etc.]
    • check for interference of family and fam#
    • ...

21:44, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Articles to watch [edit]

The following are language articles which come under repeated POV attack, often for ethnic or nationalistic reasons. Feel free to add ones you've noticed, and to remove languages which have not been a problem for some time. That way, if one of us drops out, the articles we've been watching hopefully won't go to pot.

  • Serbo-Croatian, with Croatian, Serbian, etc. (subject to ARBMAC)
  • Macedonian, re. both Bulgarian and Greek (subject to ARBMAC)
  • Hindi-Urdu, Urdu, Hindi, and Hindi languages (Note: Ethnologue 17 and the Swedish Nationalencyklopedin use Indian census data, which is invalid because it relies on speaker identification. For example, part of the Awadhi pop is counted under Awadhi, and part under Hindi.)
  • Removing green infobox coloring of 'Altaic' languages & families, esp. Korean and Japanese; also entering 'Altaic' explicitly. (Current convention: use the Altaic color the way we do Amerind, Papuan, Australian, or Khoisan, but only list it explicitly in the boxes at the constituent families and at their eponymous languages (Turkish, Mongol, and Japanese), and then as contested.
  • Old Azeri
  • Oriya (spelling issue)
  • Filipino as a distinct language from Tagalog
  • Malay, Malaysian, Indonesian
  • Population inflation: French, Kurdish, Tamil, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Yue, many Indic languages and dialects being pushed as separate languages
  • Misleading maps: Many national languages have had maps with half the world filled in because of immigration, with no apparent standard for what counts as a speaking population. Most of these will be caught by checking the top 100 at List of languages by number of native speakers.

Article assessment [edit]

Please see the Assessment Department for further instructions.

Good and featured article candidates [edit]

Good article candidates [edit]

Featured article candidates [edit]

General Strategy and Discussion forum [edit]

Templates [edit]

Languages Template [edit]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages/Template

Infobox [edit]

Project banner [edit]

Please add {{WikiProject Languages}} to talk pages of relevant articles. Currently, it displays the following:

WikiProject Languages  
WikiProject icon
Portal icon Language portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Languages, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of standardized, informative and easy-to-use resources about languages on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
 ???  This article has not yet received a rating on the project's quality scale.
 ???  This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
 

Articles with this template are put into Category:WikiProject Languages articles.

Userbox [edit]

After you sign up, you can add the project userbox to your user page by adding the following: {{User WikiProject Languages}}. The template pictured below will appear:

Human Language Families (wikicolors).png This user is a member of
WikiProject Languages.

Your username will then automatically be added to the Category:WikiProject Language members.

Categories [edit]

Click the "►" below to see all subcategories:
Languages

Resources [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Language


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Guide Guide to WikiProjects

External links [edit]

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Languages&oldid=554337552"