From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Oct 20 2005 - 17:32:29 CST
The Wikipedia Aramaic databasr is in fact grouping several languages, but
does not attempt to create a partition between the various scripts used to
write it. You should know that languages in the Neo-Aramaic family are among
the languages that have the largest number of scripts to write them.
As Wikipedia admits itself, its content needs revision, and tries to meet
consensus. But consensus can't be found if there are not enough contributors
to make and discuss revisions. Any article then starts with a vision from a
single-user perspective. This is not a bad thing, because what is important
is to share the existing knowledge, and expose it with others knowledge,
until some community is created that can seriously work. But any project
would start exactly the same way.
The most difficult is not to find data or knowledge, but to find the people
that will discuss and work together to reach a consensus. For this reason,
an open project like Wikipedia seems perfect to ease the meeting of those
involved peoples, as they can all contribute easily on domains that do not
cause conflicts, and they will then discuss together when they have
different views.
There DOES NOT exist any definitive knowledge that is considered as THE
truth for everyone. Read the Wikipedia policy, and you'll see that what it
considers important is "neutrality of point of view" which means that it
tries to collect as many point of views to offer a large panorama of
perspectives, not trying to dictate which one is THE truth, and let the
reader judge himself which point of view is valid or best fits his own
opinion.
So the quality of an article in Wikipedia is not based on what one
considered true, but on the exhaustivity of exposed point of views, and the
number of links that are related to each point of view. This is the set of
provided links, and the discussion pages that makes the consensus. For this
reason, NO wikipedia article will be ever terminated, and anyone can enhance
it by adding information and linking those articles to related subjects.
Once you have understood that, Wikipedia becomes a very precious thing, and
it does not need to reach a level that one considers as THE universal truth
(if such a thing ever exists....).
If one wants a consistant point of view, the only way to do it is by
external means, for example in books written by one author or organization
that exposes its own policy and point of view (which may be limited and not
satisfactory from the reader's perspective, if it tries to convince the
reader that what it says is THE truth, instead of saying that this expresses
the opinion of one author or organization). Wikipedia is not such a place,
because it's not its policy.
---- From: suzanne mccarthy I would have to say that I have been told by more than one person who has a website on a particular writing system and are therefore specialists in that one language, that they do not find wikipedia accurate. Two of them have told me that they have tried to revise wikipedia to be more correct but were unable to get their revisions to 'stick' and have consequently given up on it. However, this might be a chance to ask what the language that is designated as Aramaic in the Syriac script actually is. It is called Aramaic in English, It says 'd'ivrit' in the Syriac script and is designated for speakers of Neo-Aramaic. I notice that since I blogged about this page in September it has been changed to say Aramaic, on its own page, but still on the language page it looks like "d'ivrit". I know nothing about these languages, but was simply looking for more info on the Syriac script when I stumbled on this, and checked the letters in Syriac for accuracy to find it said d'ivrit. I have only since used wkipedia to share information with known people who I can identlfy - and thank you to those who have done this.
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