Wiktionary talk:Languages needing improvement

I admire your optimism, but somehow I don't believe extinct languages are really appropriate entries for this list. -- Liliana • 22:57, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Then perhaps a second list? —CodeCat 23:13, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

That might be a good idea. -- Liliana • 23:18, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

The current list could be split by the amount of speakers, maybe in three groups. That way, extinct languages would naturally fall into the bottom group. —CodeCat 23:48, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, splitting would be a good idea. The living and especially state languages of large countries in Asia and Africa should be of higher priority. There are more chances that the current situation could be improved with these - we could attract native speakers and there will be more dictionaries and software available. --Anatoli 23:55, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

We probably need some criteria for each of the lists, more than just general terms. Marshallese is a national language but it has few speakers, so it is less critical than Gujarati which has 46 million but is not a national language. —CodeCat 00:49, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

On another note, this page should be linked from a prominent place, possibly even the Main Page? -- Liliana • 14:07, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Appeal template

Languages needing improvement may need an appeal template (similar to {{welcome}} to sister projects, e.g. a request (in English) to add contents and a summary of rules and relevant pages for each language. Why not do it on a Burmese Wikipedia, for example? --Anatoli ^{(обсудить)} 23:12, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean that we should advertise our need for improvement on other Wikimedia projects? —CodeCat 23:26, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, sort of advertising or just making them aware. I don't think there will be any improvement in Burmese, Sinhalese in the near future. Both languages have millions of speakers. Knowledge of Burmese in the world is almost non-existent, English skills of Burmese people are low. They are disadvantaged not only by the language barrier but by poor support of their scripts by Microsoft and Google and others. It's just an example showing my bias to Asia, it applies to many other languages as well, of course. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить)} 23:39, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

RFD discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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(diff | hist) . . m Wiktionary:Languages needing improvement‎; 15:00 . . (+76) . . CodeCat (Talk | contribs | block)‎ (Undo revision 14109988 by Liliana-60 (talk) - entry count is not the only thing that determines quality, almost all the nouns are lacking inflection) [rollback]

In this case, the page is redundant to Category:All languages. Wiktionary is still in development, and all languages need improvement in one way or another, there isn't really a language you could consider complete at this stage, and a list like this does not add a lot of value. Heck, most German nouns lack inflection, so by that argument, you could add Category:German language to the list! As well, if someone speaks a language, he's gonna find out what needs improvement by himself, if not, this list won't help him. -- Liliana • 15:22, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Oh... looking at the title, I thought it meant that the language itself needs improvement. Y'know, like English, and spelling reform. (Kidding.) Anyway, yeah, delete unless someone presents a good argument for keeping or revamps the page so it lists what's most needed/wanted in each language (though even that should probably be on the "About language" pages, so maybe delete anyway).​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:46, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

I can't imagine this page will ever be terribly useful. On the other hand, while all languages may need clean up, some will need it more than others. In the same way that if an entry is tagged with {{rfc}} or {{rfc-sense}}, it doesn't imply that other terms/definitions not tagged don't need clean up, they just may need it less. So to be honest I just don't care. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:58, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Please don't rush into deleting. This is a first attempt and the page is far from perfect. There is some interest in this and this could be made much more useful - especially in terms of showing the number of entries. What is important is to raise awareness about some languages being neglected or wanting skills. --Anatoli 00:27, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

• Kept by default due to no discussion. I don't see it as "rushed" --ElisaVan (talk) 18:05, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

WantedPages by language

This is something I've thought about before. Most redlinked mainspace (not appendices, etc.) entries by language. Not sure if this is technically feasible. This could be the be-all end-all criterion to settle what is a "wanted language." Low German would, for example, be rather high (no pun intended) up on the list as Latvian coverage is rather (very) good and it is of high importance in etymologies (the same goes for Estonian.) On the other hand with Low German the terms tend to be on the short side with homographs in other languages so instead of redlinks it should be "terms that don't land on the target language" (which seems even less feasible.) As in the etymology of boŗ, for example, where bōr unsurprisingly doesn't lead to a nds/gml entry.

(Of course on settling what is a "wanted language" there can be other criteria too, for example, Estonian might have a decent number of entries but majority of them are lacking inflection templates although there's a good selection of them, so redlinks may not always be "be-all end-all.") Neitrāls vārds (talk) 15:24, 26 March 2014 (UTC)