Tha Seumas Moireasdan a Nis, agus tha e a-nis a fuireach ann an Steornabhagh ag obair airson Proiseact nan Ealan, a' deanamh obair theicneolas dhaibh. Tha esan dhan bheachd gu bheil deagh chothrom ann do chananan beaga an-drasta le bhith a' gluasad bho TBh/Reidio gu siostaman nas fhosgailte man an eadar lion.
The Wikipedia is a concept which almost everyone is now familiar with, an encyclopedia which anybody can edit. Many though do not realise it is a multilingual phenomenon. There are approaching 250 different language wikipedias, including many languages that have never had an a encyclopedia in their history. An example of this is the Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia or 'An leabhar mòr-eòlais saor' started in September 2003 and appproaching ~4300 articles today. At the moment many of these are stubs ( base articles waiting to be expanded ) but there a growing number of well-written and translated articles on subjects that have never before had decent online Gaelic references before.
I became interested in the potenial for the Gaelic wikipedia and its neighbouring Celtic wikipedias, Vicipéid, an Chiclipéid Shaor ( Irish ) and Wicipedia, y gwyddoniadur rhydd ( Welsh ) when I was at a conference with Welsh and Irish speakers discussing possible projects to strengthen ties between the languages. I felt it was an obvious framework to strengthen links between our cultures.
It is interesting to compare the relative performances of the Celtic wikipedias, as these may reflect the state of the languages. From the accompanying graph you can see that of the 3 main celtic languages in the UK, Welsh is the best performer with steady growth and a size which is approaching 7500 articles with a depth ( a kind of quality indicator ) of 21. Gaelic and Irish have a similar performance, BUT Gaelige is about 400 articles bigger, WITH a much higher depth of 19 compared with 9 for Gaelic; it also has a more consistent growth rate. We can also look to the strongest Celtic language in size, Breton. Their wikipedia is definitely the biggest - approaching 12500 - reflecting their larger speaker base, although it has a similar depth to Gaelic.
What can we gather from these statistics? The Welsh and Irish languages have been officialy recognised in their respective countries longer. Gaelic has only recently recieved that recognition and only now is Gaelic-medium Education been offered widely. Those circumstances I believe have generated a literacy problem within the Gaelic language which I believe is indicated particularly in the depth of the Gaelic wikipedia.
The simultaneous growth of these wikipedias also give us the opportunity to foster ties betweens the languages. It is possible to traverse the articles from Irish to Gaelic if parallel articles exist; this allows us to compare without having to resort to English. It also allows those of us with the ability to translate between these versions and grow our multilingual skills.
I believe that the Celtic language wikipedias have a great potenial for representing their respective cultures online. As they grow in quality their results creep up the rankings of search engines providing a positive feedback loop of people looking for specific Celtic information on a topic and when finding these they can in turn link to them or even contribute to them strengthening its reputation.
When ever we write or publish online about a relatively unknown topic webwise we should realise that in a way we are teaching the search engines about that topic. There is a definite lack of Gaelic resources online currently and I feel that the open framework the wikipedias offer give us all a fantastic opportunity for teaching the world about our own language and culture.
Tha mi smaoineachadh an-drasta gu bheil an canan againn feumach air torr fiosrachaidh mhath air loidhne agus gu bheil seo na chothrom math a dheanamh. 'S urrainn dhuinn torr ionnsachadh bhon an doigh anns a bheil na Cumrish a cur failte air daoine le cananan eile. Bu chorr dhuinn an cothrom seo a ghabhail neart a thoirt don chanan againn.
1 comment:
Interesting post, especially the last bit about the importance of teaching search engines about subjects written about/discussed in minority languages.
Although the number of articles on An leabhar mòr-eòlais saor is lower, I'm sure it's 'article per speaker' is much higher. On the Wicipedia (Welsh), I notice that there are a lot of stubs, which can mislead the stats.
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