The names in parentheses are meant to be transliterations, not translations! Remember the purpose is to allow a language user to recognise the language, not to allow English readers to identify it. It's an interesting idea, whether we might like to give translations for the benefit of English readers, but that's not what we've done so far. -- Toby Bartels 20:55, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Is there some agreement about minimum number of articles a Wikipedia project must have before it is allowed to be added to this section ? Because if there is I missed it. It seems to me that the level of activity for a Wiki is more important than the number of articles, particularly when a new language project has just started. When I started contributing to the English Wikipedia it had few articles and poor coverage of just about every area. However by publishing links to it we got more contributors, more activity and more content.

That's why I'd like to see some discussion before links to other Wikipedia projects are removed from this section. User:Sj's removals at the moment seem rather arbitrary. After all a fifty article count doesn't make an encyclopedia much more useful than a five article count. Even if the interface isn't fully translated, a link is useful for attracting people to help. So why not leave them all in with the aim of getting more exposure and hence more activity. -- Derek Ross 23:33, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I would have to agree with Derek. Since I am working on the Urdu Wikipedia alone. And it is through this link that a few others have come in and added a couple of things to the site. So this can be a good opportunity for people to pitch in. In the end it is all about spreading knowledge is it not.

The five languages I removed all had minimal work done on them; a single bilingual contributor could have done that work in a few hours. I like the idea of promoting new and growing wikipedias! But it is important that WP not give the impression we are boasting "many languages" when we really only have content in a few. There are a few threshholds for content:

• we say "Wikipedia has X articles in [over] L languages." L here is roughtly the # of Wikipedias with over [??] langs.
• we list a language on our http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm interlingual stats page]. semi-arbitrary decision made at the time; I wrote the maintainer of the page to encourage a reasonable way of selecting sites for stats.
• we list certain languages from the full language list on the Main Page -- that is, on this page.

If you check the instructions for creating a new language, "Add a link on the English Wikipedia" comes after 5 other important steps.

Reasons for not listing all 168 languages on the full language list on the main page:

1. Quality: If someone randomly picks a link from this "other languages" list, and is taken to a clumsily organized page with 99% of its links broken and text partly in English, partly in another language -- and the only articles linked-to are one-word or one-sentence stubs -- it reflects badly on the project.
2. Honesty: We advertise WP has been translated into "50+" languages; and indeed, there are at least that many serious WP projects. If we then add another 20 langs which have no serious, active contributors, a visitor who randomly visits one of the underdeveloped sites will think we are boastful.
3. Honor: It is a minor honor and a milestone to have a WP version you are working on show up on the main page. This shouldn't be the first thing you do once you've created the first User page on a new language WP, before you translate the main page text. Content comes first.

If you think any of the sites I have removed from the list are under active development, please explain why you think so! +sj+ 20:00, 2004 Mar 26 (UTC)

Note: if you are worried about generally getting others to help fledgling projects, perhaps you want to add a "help fledling languages" link at the end, with links to the tiny WPs and notes on their progress? +sj+ 20:02, 2004 Mar 26 (UTC)

We should have a hard limit like 500 or 1,000 articles for a wikipedia to be included on the main page. This would make it more fair and easier to maintain. Small wikipedias will creep into the list and possibly not be removed if the enthusiasm and activity on that particular wikipedia drops. I'll make a survey and see wherer different thresholds put us. [[User:Sverdrup|User:Sverdrup]] 15:31, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I don't know if [1] is complete, but using that data, here are the results:

[[User:Sverdrup|User:Sverdrup]] 16:13, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I noticed the Tagalog version is not listed in your language list whereas it is in the French Wikipedia. And it's not the only one missing in the foreign languages section. The list from the French Wikipedia is much longer. I wish i could have added the other languages myself, but the page is locked... JackJeff 12:00, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

If there is agreement that it can be added, anyone can add it to Template:Wikipedialang as that is not protected. This will be transcluded onto the main page. Angela. 12:12, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Ok. Thanks. I'm just new and I ignored it. I'll work on it. JackJeff 12:16, Apr 2, 2004 (UTC)

Moved to

Moved to MediaWiki talk:Wikipedialang. There should be a link in the languages section on the bottom.

ייִדיש http://yi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Firstly, keep up the good work! I'm excited there is a growing Yiddish Wikipedia. That said, there are over 150 wp domains that have a "this domain is set aside for language X" main page, but not much else. I, at least, try to avoid listing a WP language subdomain until it clearly has an active fluent contributor/ambassador -- or until it made it through the first four steps of the "how to set up a new-language wikipedia" guidelines [key interface elts translated, main page translated, 2-3 key meta pages such as "how to contribute to this site" translated]. +sj+ 00:35, 2004 Apr 9 (UTC)

I think it's good to list them anyway as that can attract new editors. Dori | Talk 00:46, Apr 9, 2004 (UTC)

Then let's list all of them on the main page, as they do on fr:. I think they do a lot of things well in that list, like including the French name for langs where it isn't obvoius. Personally, as noted above, I think it reflects poorly on WP for someone to come to our long list of langs, pick one at random, and see that it's only a half-hearted effort. We might look boastful, and all our statistics become suspect. That said, I don't mind listing all of our created versions on the main page if that's what people want. I do think it's odd to list some and not others, and there should be further discussion... +sj+ 01:49, 2004 Apr 10 (UTC)

Could someone add a link on the Main page to the Corsican edition (http://co.wikipedia.org) under the label "corsu". Thank you. Paul

DONE! :) ~j

Dear ~j (jen?), see my note under the Yiddish request below. Paul -- please find a fluent corsican who can at least translate the main page and the basic MediaWiki messages into Corsican before listing it on the Main Page. (Note that it is only two links away, via the "all languages" link.)

:co has three respectable articles: Algebra, Analisa, Pruvverbii; and three other non-stub articles: Sopranomi, Toponimi, and Scienzi_naturale (which was a separate article from the identical Scienze_naturale until a moment ago, when I redirected one to the other). +sj+ 00:44, 2004 Apr 9 (UTC)

That's wise. We'll work to expand the Corsican wikipedia, until it reaches a sufficient amount. Best. Paul

Hi, I reformatted the HTML comment at the bottom of the article. The whitespace above and below the comment was the only thing keeping the main page from being valid HTML according to http://validator.w3.org. I hope that's OK.

The problem was that this whole page is included inside a <small> tag on the main page, but the blank lines at the end of the article were converted to <p>, which isn't allowed inside <small>. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but now the main page validates. Wmahan. 22:52, 2004 Apr 13 (UTC)

I think the native word for the Cassubian language is "Kaszëbsczi." This seems to be the case, according to [2] (see the "content-language" thing at top-right). – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 23:35, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

According to Sanskrit, the Devanāgarī translation for the Sanskrit language is "संस्कृतम्". – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 21:31, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Was there some discussion somewhere before the languages were re-ordered into English alphabetical order rather than alphabetical order of the names of the languages for themselves, as was done yesterday? I find the new order extremely disorientating -- I simply could not find cy (Cymraeg) for a long time without checking the edit history and discovering it had moved to the very end, Welsh. Furthermore, nearly every other Wikipedia lists languages either in language code or individual local name order (sometimes with a translation), which results in languages being in pretty much the same location in all language lists, if they're listed at all, and thus easier to find when you're jumping between Wikipedias. -- Arwel 12:46, 3 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

I agree it should be by order of the local name, not the English name. I'm not sure I see the benefit of having the English names on here at all. It looked a lot clearer the old way with only the local one, and is more consistent with most other Wikipedias. Angela. 20:44, May 3, 2004 (UTC)

Using a visible sort-key (i.e., listing the transliteration or English name in parens for langs in non-Latin-1 scripts) makes sense. Having the English name also makes sense to me, for the benighted folk who don't know the native name of a lang they're looking for, but I don't feel strongly about it. +sj+ 19:19, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

Indeed the advantages of having a single order across all WPs outweights the other issues for me; I'm all for switching back. +sj+ 19:28, 2004 May 6 (UTC) (Note also that fr:, which overall has a very thoughtful layout, orders langs by French name; I wonder what their reasons were. +sj+ 10:30, 2004 May 7 (UTC))

Some pros and cons:

• Why not just order all versions by the two-letter or three-letter ISO code? That's how most Wikipedias are doing it. -- Kwekubo 23:30, 8 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

It would likely make it quite hard to find some languages. If you order by the ISO code, and provide the English name of the language before the local name, some languages, such as Croatian (Hrvatski, hr:), will seem horribly out of place alphabetically, and people will have a hard time finding it.

Likewise, if you provide the local name before the English name, some languages, such as Suomeksi (Finnish, fi:), will be horribly out of place alphabetically, and people will again have a hard time finding it.

 – Minh Nguyễn (talk, blog) 20:49, 14 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know that I like taking those out of the lineup; I like being neutral about the size of the other WPs, and not trying to privilege the largest ones. That said, if they /are/ to be separated from the rest of the langs -- let's say, to improve the image of WP's multilinguality -- they shouldn't be in order of size, but ordered the same way as the rest of the list. +sj+ 19:31, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

• looks as if they are now not ordered at all (not alphabetically by name or code, not by size and not reverse by any criterium). IMHO it would be better if there was any ordering 195.93.66.5 21:41, 6 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

• It's ordered the same way the rest of the list is -- by English name. If you think we should change that ordering (note that fr: is ordered similarly, by French name), then it should be changed for both the 'ten largest' and for the 'other active' lists. +sj+ 10:28, 2004 May 7 (UTC)

As they are already taken out as the "ten largest", I think they should be sorted after size. In my opinion, the title "ten largest" implies they are. We should make it easy for our readers. wikipedia.org points to the English Main Page, and the vast majority of people who are trying to find another wikipedia are looking the large ones, like the German and French. Elizabeth A 12:19, 9 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

• Chinese shouldn't have two separate listings here... it's just syntatctically a bit broken to say "Chinese (traditional) - Chinese (simplified)" --there should be no ndash between the two languages, and the "Chinese" shouldn't really be duplicated. "Chinese (traditional | simplified)" makes more sense (perhaps with a comma in place of a "|"). +sj+
  • My choice for format would be "<Zhongwen> （jian | fan） (Chinese)", where Zhongwen/jian/fan are replaced with suitable chinese chars, the escape chars 65288 and 65299 are the raised equivalent of Latin-1 parens (high enough to properly enclose chinese characters), and both jian and fan link to the appropriate-script main page for zh:. What do you all think? +sj+ 06:47, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

I am moving the Conlangs back into the main list for the following reasons:

1. First of all, Tok Pisin isn't even a constructed language.
2. Esperanto is a notable language because it contains over 12,000 articles in it's Wikipedia.
3. It would seem wrong to tell the people who spent their time volunteering to make these Wikipedias that their languages aren't even real (which they are real).
4. I feel like correcting it.

Hey, isn't there a Klingon wikipedia? That should be in the list too. Andre 04:28, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I've taken a page out of your book (whoever you are) and acted bold in correcting it. Andre 04:54, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think that these links should be arranged in alphabetical order according to either the ISO code or the spelling in the target language itself. These links are not primarily for English speakers, but for speakers of the other languages to help them find their Wikipedia. --21:31, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Just noticed a message about languages - fakelangs represent a problem in my view, and I had thought that separating natural from fake was a good way to start. Thanks -Stevertigo 06:35, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't this page be protected? It's included in the Main Page. -phma 18:08, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Anyone can edit the parts of the Main Page, it's just hard to figure out how for the average vandal. Andre 19:50, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Why are the quick links part of Wikipedialang? Can't they just go on the normal Main Page? They probably should be.

Is there any reason not to remove the following 54 languages? All have less than 1000 articles and are not amongst the most widely spoken languages. Angela. 03:06, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)

Elsässisch (Alsatian) – Aragonés (Aragonese) – Asturianu (Asturian) – Azərbaycan (Azeri) – Беларуская (Belarusian) – Bislama – বাংলা (Bengali) – Brezhoneg (Breton) – Bosanski (Bosnian) – ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee) – Corsu (Corsican) – Kaszëbsczi (Kashubian) – فارسی (Persian) – Føroyskt (Faroese) – Gaeilge (Irish) – Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) – Guarani – Ido – Íslenska (Icelandic) – Lojban – ქართული (Georgian) – ភាសាខ្មែរ (Khmer) – Kurdî (Kurdish) – кыргызча (Kyrgyz) – Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish) – Lietuvių (Lithuanian) – Latviešu (Latvian) – Malagasy – Māori – Македонски (Macedonian) – Malayalam – Монгол (Mongolian) – Nauri (Nauruan) – Nahuatl – Plattdüütsch (Low Saxon) – Langue d'Oc (Occitan) – ਪੰਜਾਬੀ / پنجابی (Punjabi) – Armâneashti (Aromanian) – संस्कृत (Sanskrit) – Sardu (Sardinian) – Srpskohrvatski (Serbo-Croatian) – Slovenčina (Slovak) – Shqip (Albanian) – Basa Sunda (Sundanese) – Kiswahili (Swahili) – Тоҷикӣ (Tajik) – ไทย (Thai) – Tagalog – tlhIngan Hol (Klingon) – toki pona – Tok Pisin – Tatarça (Tatar) – Volapük – ייִדיש (Yiddish) –

I suggest keeping all those that have 1000 articles, and also ur, vi, ta, te, mr, min-nan, jv, hi, gu, bn, and ar because those are the languages with the most speakers. This includes 52 languages as shown below. Angela. 03:06, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)

Afrikaans – العربية (Arabic) – Български (Bulgarian) – বাংলা (Bengali) – Català (Catalan) – Cymraeg (Welsh) – Česká (Czech) – Dansk (Danish) – Deutsch (German) – Ελληνικά (Greek) – Esperanto – Español (Spanish) – Eesti (Estonian) – Euskara (Basque) – Suomeksi (Finnish) – Français (French) – Frysk (Western Frisian) – Gallego (Galician) – Gujarati – עברית (Hebrew) – हिन्दी (Hindi) – Hrvatski (Croatian) – Magyar (Hungarian) – Interlingua – Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) – Italiano (Italian) – 日本語 (Japanese) – Bahasa Jawa (Javanese) – 한국어 (Korean) – Latina (Latin) – Hō-ló-oē (Southern Min) – मराठी (Marathi) – Bahasa Melayu (Malay) – Nederlands (Dutch) – Norsk (Norwegian) – Polska (Polish) – Português (Portuguese) – Română (Romanian) – Русский (Russian) – Simple English – Slovenščina (Slovenian) – Српски (Serbian) – Svenska (Swedish) – தமிழ் (Tamil) – తెలుగు (Telugu) – Türkçe (Turkish) – Українська (Ukrainian) – اردو (Urdu) – Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese) – Walon (Walloon) – 繁體中文 (Chinese, traditional) – 简体中文 (Chinese, simplified)

Personally I think all the active Wikipedias should be on the list, so to attract editors that speak that language. Andre 03:27, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I agree with this, though I would make it "active and localized"; I think a completed interface is an important step before listing a lang-wp as "Wikipedia in other languages".

I am currently pruning out the projects with an incomplete interface (that is, with significant untranslated interface-text on the main page) or fewer than 50 non-stub articles (as a measure of activity). +sj+ 03:54, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Of the ones I suggested removing, the following are inactive. The numbers show the number of new pages in July, or the total number of pages ever. als (2), an (38 total), az (0), bi (2 edits in 30 days), bn (0), br (22 total), bs (13), chr (24 total), co (0), fo (50 total), gd (14), gn (1), jbo (7 total), ka (0), km (2 total), ky (2 total), lv (18), mg (3), mi (4), mk (1), ml (1), mn (0 in August), na (0), nah (11), oc (0), pa (3 total), roa-rup (2) sc (1 total), sh (1 edit in the last 30 days), sk (2), sq (4), sw (49 total), tg (0 edits in the last 30 days), tl (52 total), tlh (44 total), tokipona (30), tpi (27), vo (0), yi (0),

This means the following have some reasonable level of activity, but have less than 1000 articles and are not amongst the most widely spoken. I'm not convinced these should be included.

Asturianu (Asturian) – Беларуская (Belarusian) – Kaszëbsczi (Kashubian) – فارسی (Persian) – Gaeilge (Irish) – Ido – Íslenska (Icelandic) – Kurdî (Kurdish) – Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish) – Lietuvių (Lithuanian) – Plattdüütsch (Low Saxon) – Basa Sunda (Sundanese) – ไทย (Thai) – Tatarça (Tatar)

Of these, Asturian and Belarusian are not fully translated. Asturian has one very new admin, and Belarusian has none. Neither of these should be included yet. Angela. 04:47, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)

If the rest of them are fully translated and have activity, we should keep them on the list. Andre 18:57, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I've made this change now, so the active, translated ones are included, even where they have less than 1000 articles. Angela. 23:43, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)

Where are you getting these statistics? Perhaps these have changed greatly in the last month. Please re-add ast: and sk:, which now appear active (20+ edits/day) and fully translated, with 890 and 868 articles, respectively (the latter having a remarkable collection of stubs in Philosophy). Please also add bs: (430 arts, 8 new arts and 1 new image yesterday, a decent collection of top-level articles).

Populous languages with dead wikipedias Please remove bn: (8 arts total, of which only 3 have bn: content; unfinished interface) and te: (3 arts total; English interface and english introduction) and gu: (7 arts total; English interface) and mr: (5 arts total, only 3 with mr: content; English interface). I see what you mean about these langs having a large number of speakers. I want to feature them prominently to expand their communities. But I fret about having completely dormant or unpopulated WPs mixed in with active ones...

I support having much lower standards for populous langs -- for instance, jv: has low activity and only a handful of non-stubs, but should clearly be included -- but they should still have a translated interface and some main-page content. My thoughts are, how will visitors who are excited to see their language on the lang-list, and follow that link, react to what they see? What will they think of the project as a whole? We don't want a visitor to follow a link to bn: and think, "oh, right, translated into 86 languages, my foot." +sj+ 02:20, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps we could have a separate line, "Major languages in need of contribution": for large langs with small or inactive communities? +sj+

The stats are from Wikipedia:Multilingual ranking July 2004. Angela. 15:23, Aug 28, 2004 (UTC)

Protest from slovak wiki! :) Please dont remove us! I hope we will have 1000 articles (I hope) in a few days :) We translated interface few weeks ago and now we plan to start campaign for enlarge contributors comunity (your removing could make REALLY BAD IMPACT to this plan) :::::Liso 13:06, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Giving some support to Liso: I don't think wikipedia links should be removed because they are too small. Sure, you're helping Wikipedia's image, but you are also hurting the growth of those small Wikipedias.

Instead of removing those links, why not make a finer distinction? Instead of just having two categories, "over-10000" and "under-10000", we can have 5 categories: "over-10000", "over-1000", "over-100", "struggling", and "planned". This way visitors know exactly what they'll see when they click on a link, and those interested in building up small wikipedias will see a link right on the main page. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 14:16, Aug 29, 2004 (UTC)