Quechua Wikipedia
 (Quechua Wikipedia) |
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|---|---|
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| Qispi insiklupidiya | |
| Internet encyclopedia | |
| languages | Quechua |
| operator | Wikimedia Foundation |
| editorial staff | All employees |
| Registration | Possible |
| On-line | January 2003 (currently active) |
| https://qu.wikipedia.org/ | |
The Quechua Wikipedia ( Wikipidiya ) is the Wikipedia in the Quechua language and was founded in 2003. With more than 17,000 articles in June 2012, it was the largest edition in a native American language .
history
After it was founded, the project got off to a very subdued start. Until October 2004 the Quechua Wikipedia consisted only of the main page, which initially contained the standard English text for a long time until it was slowly translated into Quechua. In the months that followed, individual users created a few short articles (stubs) and a help page in Spanish . The first independent administrator of the project was appointed in January 2005 by the Wikimedia Foundation . In addition to the first extensive articles, this user also created templates and some internal pages, but the number of edits initially remained low. The number of active users stagnated between May 2005 and May 2006, and the hundredth article was not written until June 2006.
A new situation arose towards the end of 2006, when the first user with more in-depth language skills registered, the German-speaking AlimanRuna, who also runs a website on the subject of Quechua, through whose initiative the number of articles skyrocketed and created the first serious help and project pages in Quechua were. In December 2006, the version exceeded 1,000 articles.
In the course of 2007, numerous improvements made it possible to acquire additional users (the number of active users doubled between January and December), so that the project now has a comparatively small but stable number of employees. In the winter of 2007/08, AlimanRuna also translated the interface of the MediaWiki software into Quechua, which is why, with the exception of the Spanish help pages, the entire content of the language version is now in Quechua.
In January 2008, Quechua Wikipedia had more than 350 registered users, 33 of whom are active and an average of 10 making more than 100 edits per month. 20% of the articles are larger than 2 kB, 65% larger than 0.5 kB, the average was 1457 bytes, and about 11.5 edits are made per article.
In the period that followed, there was initially significant growth. In October 2007 the number of articles reached 5,000 for the first time, in March 2009 the mark of 10,000 and in January 2010 of 15,000 articles was reached. The increase then slowed down again. In August 2015, the 20,000th article was discontinued.
Internal and special features
The Quechua Wikipedia is mainly written by second and third language speakers, most of whom have little knowledge, so the Babel templates only have one native speaker, one user with advanced knowledge (AlimanRuna) and two with intermediate knowledge. The language version takes this fact into account by offering numerous tools with which even users with little knowledge can write articles, such as standardized stub templates and several help pages in Spanish.
Most users stated Spanish as their native language in April 2008, followed by German speakers (including some of the most active authors) and English speakers, and a few claimed to be French or Finnish.
Significance for the language area
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Quechua is spoken as the first language of around 10 million people , most of whom live in remote areas of western South America . A major problem is the limited availability of printed or electronically published works in Quechua, which is why most speakers use the language only in oral communication ( orality ). In this respect, Wikipedia in Quechua is potentially of great importance, as it is the first encyclopedia ( excluding pure dictionaries ) in the language.
Another problem is the fact that Quechua has hardly been standardized so far, with several spellings and grammars co-existing. There are numerous unofficial societies and associations that deal with the language, but there is no consensus on these questions, which in the countries in which the language is spoken have been determined independently and in some cases very differently. To make matters worse, it is disputed whether Quechua represents a single language or a dialect continuum , as the dialects of Central Peru ( Waywash , also called Quechua I) in particular differ greatly from the rest. On the help pages of the Quechua Wikipedia, at the beginning of the project, it was suggested to accept all dialects, but no regulation was specified. In practice, almost all articles are in the sub-form of Southern Quechua (Quechua IIc), a spelling standard created for the southern Quechua variants that goes back to the linguist Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino . This summarizes common features of the dialect group also known as Quechua IIc, which is also by far the most widely spoken variant of the language.
There has been a lengthy debate among Quechua education activists about whether to use three or five vowels . While one of the larger Quechua associations, the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua , still clings to five vowels, the spelling with three vowels has established itself in practice, as it accurately reproduces the sound of Quechua. That is why the Quechua Wikipedia is written with three vowels.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Statistics page of Quechua Wikipedia accessed in June 2012.
- ↑ a b c d e f Statistics from Quechua Wikipedia