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Wiktionnaire:Actualités/035-February-2018

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Wiktionnaire:Actualités is a monthly periodical about French Wiktionary, dictionaries and words, published online since April 2015. Everyone is welcome to contribute to it. You can sign in to be noticed of future issues, read old issues and participate to the draft of the next edition. You can also have a look at Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia. If you have any comments, critics or suggestions, our talk page is open!

Actualités - Numéro 35 - février 2018
A winter light.

Detail of a winter vision taken at De Fryske Marren in the Netherlands by Dominicus Johannes Bergsma. You can click to see the whole picture!

Highlights

Tawny Funnel Cap photographed by Dominicus Johannes Bergsma. This month we explore the pictures by Dominicus, a major contributor to Wikimedia Commons.

  • The language spoken in the film Black Panther is a real language spoken in South Africa! It is the Xhosa language, a language spoken by more than 8 million people and more particularly the isiXhosa dialect. The New York Times and Le Monde are publishing an article giving some details about this story. For the story, we mention the Indian film Baahubali, which chose to use an invented language. Madan Karky, its creator, introduces clicks, which are sounds present in the Xhosa language and typical of the Khoisan languages! A short article tells the story of the invention of this language.
  • Jacob Rogers, legal counsel to the Wikimedia Foundation, has posted a preliminary point of view on a legal issue of interest to Wiktionary: copyright protection of lexicographic data. The related talk page also provides some important details.
  • @Isbms27 and @Inversemblant proposed on the English-speaking Wiktionary a template for structuring word information. At the same time, a similar reflection began in French on grammatical information.

New stuff in Wiktionary

  • Creation and enabling for everyone of the gadget LiensAncresDansCategories created by Automatik that automatically modifies the links in the category pages to link to the sections for the corresponding languages.
  • Creation of the Illustrations project that aims to discuss current uses of images and to write help pages for more collaboration.

Proposal for creations

  • The suffix -gnosie (-gnosis) is used to describe knowledge disorders in medicine. This month we propose to create the articles for its many derivatives that are listed in its page.

Detail of frosted oak leaves photographed by Dominicus Johannes Bergsma.

Wiktionary Communities

The people who participate on Wiktionary form a community that shares a common goal: to create a lexicographic object that will revolutionize the definition of the dictionary. This month we will look at some of our allies, focusing on three communities: Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikidata.

The community of people who contribute to Wikipedia is perhaps the largest in size. Many people are from both Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and some people even make active links between the two projects. We mention for example Alphabeta, who adds a lot of links on one side and the other, and Noé who adds links to thesauri and informs the Bistro every month of the Actualités release. Other people no longer contribute to Wikipedia after being banned or excluded. While the Wikipedia community’s vision of Wiktionary has not been studied in detail, it can nevertheless be noted that reactions to the Bistro or in face-to-face meetings are generally positive, benevolent, and relatively well informed.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the structure that hosts the projects. In addition to its role as a technical operator that ensures the safety and sustainability of the site, it is the organization that manages the collection of annual funds which allows projects to continue. Although we may regret the weak software development dedicated to the Wiktionary project as a whole during its first years, we note the investment over the past year for the creation of a module managing the links between the language versions of the Wiktionaries.

The Wikimedia Foundation also includes an employee team called Support & Safety, which monitors individuals by reviewing harassment complaints on a confidential basis, which can ban individuals from all communities based on a discretionary assessment. It was this team that banned Classiccardinal, one of the administrators of the French Wiktionary, in January 2018. His role and connection to the Wiktionary community was not defined by the latter, which largely contested its modus operandi following this decision.

Wikidata is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that aims to collect and organize structured data. Since its inception, many people have expressed an interest in the lexicographic data already collected, discussed and structured in the Wiktionaries. However, both communities have difficulty communicating their objectives and agreeing on the benefits of working together. A discussion started on February 22nd on the license to be used for lexicographic data in Wikidata illustrates the divide between the two communities.

Other communities revolve around the Wiktionary project, and each person identifies different connections between the different communities. The Projet:Coopération page aims to bring together discussions and reflections on the Wiktionary place in this network of allies, so that new joint projects can more easily emerge. If you are interested, do not hesitate to take part in the discussions! A review by Noé.

Statistics

From mid-January to mid-February (from 01/20/2018 to 02/20/2018)
  • French entries increased by 3,560 and quotations increased by 7,261. There are now 361,261 lemmas, 533,463 definitions, and 341,680 quotations or examples.
  • The three other languages which progressed the most are Northern Sami (+ 4,907 entries), Esperanto (+ 3,080 entries), and Ukrainian (+ 3,009 entries).
  • In February 18,215 entries were created for 180 languages!
Words of the month

External stats provided numbers on:

Other improvements
  • There are 36,273 illustrative media items (pictures and videos) on the French Wiktionary pages, an increase of 493 in a month.
  • The Wikistats 2.0 website now offers a map of the countries that consult the most each project. For the French-speaking Wiktionary we can see that France comes first and that the different countries where French is spoken then appear, with a high number of views from the United States, a country in which the number of Internet accesses per inhabitant is very high, which is perhaps the origin of this important traffic.
  • The English Wiktionary   reaches 500,000 lemmas in English! Lemmas are counted without taking into account inflections (only infinitives for verbs, for example). This is a very nice stage for a project that also contains more than 80,000 French lemmas! This is far more than the number of English lemmas defined on the French Wiktionary! Thanks to contributor Wyang, here is a nice representation of the evolution for French lemmas!
Number of French lemmas (words without inflections) defined on English Wiktionary.

Fun facts

The first orca to speak is called Wikie! She knows how to say "Hello","one, two, three" and "bye-bye" (although the experiment was conducted in France). As always the newspaper headlines are catchy, and this specimen is no smarter than its congeners: she repeats the sounds like a parrot. We like to give names to animals that have anthropomorphic behaviour. This month we also announce the death of Nigel, the only northern gannet who had found refuge on the island specially designed for its species, with 80 concrete birds in his likeness shouting, thanks to solar energy. Any hope of recolonization is now lost. As a reminder, a few years ago a black swan that fell in love with a paddle boat shaped like a white swan was named Peter. Someone did a genetic analysis and Peter has been renamed Petra. —A review by Romainbehar

 

LexiSession on radio

Initiated by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, LexiSessions suggested monthly themes to simultaneously engage all Wiktionaries. The themes are suggested in advance on Meta and announced every month on Wikidémie, the main community portal.

February LexiSession was on the theme of radio which led to the creation of a new thesaurus about radio in French and a thesaurus about waves in French!

For March, the suggested theme is mathematics!


Videos

This section gives a monthly selection of videos related to linguistics and the French language. Do not hesitate to add more videos that you find!

The channel J’aime Parler Français 100% explains where to place in a sentence the adjective, the adverb, and how to use the past participle.

  • Le Monde des langues explains how the slogan "learning a language like a child" promoted by some courses is misleading. In doing so, it provides advice for good learning.

Dictionary

Van der Veen L. J., Bodinga-bwa-Bodinga S., 2002, Gedandedi sa geviya, dictionnaire geviya-français, Louvain/Paris, Editions Peeters, collection Langues et littératures de l'Afrique Noire XII.

This dictionary is quite an exceptional work. Its first version, more than 1,200 pages, was written by a speaker of the Viya language of Gabon, who devoted several years of his life to it. In 1988, the meeting with a French linguist marked the beginning of a collaboration to publish this work. In 2002 they published the improved work: a bilingual dictionary describing precisely the words of this language spoken today by fewer than 50 people. In 2003, they returned together to the Eviya community to inaugurate this dictionary. This final stage was followed by the documentary filmmaker Laurent Maget, who produced a twenty-minute documentary about this particular moment. Last chapter to date, an article by the French linguist has been published in a collection of accounts by field linguists, here is an excerpt of which summarizes the difficulties in making such a dictionary:

"Scientists and speakers do not have the same concerns and, consequently, the same reflexes. Several problems have arisen, the main ones being as follows: the transcription of certain sounds and the attachment of speakers to the spelling of French (connotations of prestige), the transcription of tones, the order of entries (problem of class prefixes for nominal and verbal entries), the organization of entries, translations (in standard French), the identification of certain referees (specialized lexicons), examples illustrating the different meanings of an entry." — (Lolke J. Van der Veen, « "Le Dictionnaire" de la langue geviya au Gabon » in Linguistique de terrain sur langues en danger. Locuteurs et linguistes, edited by Grinevald C. & Bert M., Special Issue Faits de Langues Les Cahiers n°35-36, Ophrys, 2010, page 396.)

This dictionary is first intended for the community in Gabon that speaks this language, and then more generally for people who might be interested in this language. It has taken years of effort, both for the collection of words and the organization of the whole, and yet it is still not very accessible, as stated in the article dedicated to it in 2010 (page 396). First, because it is relatively expensive but also because there is no book distribution network to ensure that it can reach its audience. There is no digital version of the book, but this would not necessarily be the community's wish, and may not make it more accessible. As stated in the documentary, this work has at least allowed the world to learn of the existence of this people and their rich culture. Within a few decades, the content of this dictionary will pass into the public domain and it could be integrated into websites that would then be responsible for archiving and preserving its content. Thus, although there may one day be no one left to speak this language, it could be relearned thanks to this dictionary and the people who will pass it on to future generations. Wiktionary may then have a role to play in this story, and a know-how to contribute to the pooling of the preserved words. Elsewhere, Wiktionary could be used by speakers of minor languages before it is too late, but this requires a spread and greater ease of use that still needs to be developed. —A review by Noé.

Detail of a frosted alder branch photographed by Dominicus Johannes Bergsma.

Anciens numéros


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