Enable aae: Arbërisht

Very well. I did as you said: I am now on the list of translators, I elevated my babel box to level 3, and I invited a native Arbëresh speaker to create accounts here and on Wikimedia in order to help my translation efforts. I also foresaw the requirements you mentioned, that is why I came here in the first place. Now my question is: Who is able to enable aae translations and where can I submit such a request?

Ftillimi (talk)12:14, 25 March 2022
Edited by author.
Last edit: 23:56, 25 March 2022

This is the right place. Normally a site admin (probably from bureaucrats, including possibly Trizek (WMF) who works for the Wikimedia Foundation in relation with communities) should see your request here and reply. Do what you can in your new Incubator with users you can involve to the project, to show their support. I just gave suggestions in order for you to be convincing. I cannot do anything more

As well you can add your request to Wikimedia's language team (the relevant links are in the entry page of your Incubator), may be they'll create a task in Wikimedia's Phabricator if other Wikimedia users are convincing. And outside Wikimedia, you may find other projects for their wikis or software or site projects that are already using Translatewiki.net, that could have their own request with their own supporting users. You may also find relevant support from local schools or linguistic departments of universities in Italy, or from Italian public libraries for their archives, books or sponsored cultural programs.

So collect as many relevant sources that may be useful (you can do that in your Incubator, or inside other wikimedia wikis, such as Italian or Albanian Wikisource in dedicated subsections/categories/portals and wikiprojects/talks). You may also find open-sourced terminologic lists, social network groups or channels, and local associations or user groups supporting this development. Add as many references as you can and start organizing them, with the help of other contributors that may want to help you. And try to develop a "testbed" with some examplar contents (you're not required to develop a fully functional Wikipedia covering all topics: start simple, focusing first on some important topics that are relevant more specifically for that language and how it differentiates from standard Albanian, or how it evolved in contact with Italian (grammar, vocabulary, orthography, phonetics, some articles about most famous artists or photos and facsimiles of cultural creations...).

Also find the help of graphic designers for relevant maps on Wikimedia Commons (modern or historical aspects: even if you are not a great graphist, make some good drafts: you may create a snapshot from another basemap and add annotations and import some PNG image, ask on Wikimedia Commons helps to create better looking maps, and don't forget to provide some basic translations, notably in Italian or English, so that what you'll create will be found by other people). Finally you can already add data in Wikidata. All that's is a lot of work, and of course you cannot do everything alone, so invite people and welcome them to help you (if you're alone, your work is at risk of being damaged or deleted in Wikimedia sites and you may be exposed to offensive attacks because what you'll have done will not be "perfect" in their opinion). This initial setup will be long and hard, and this is in fact general for all minority languages, until a sufficient consensus is reached at least for some basic stable structure.

In the Incubator, don't focus much on presentation (navboxes, templates...: you may prefill some data but hide them to avoid many "red links" that will complicate the navigation) or complete coverage of any topic (except a few examplar articles/pages: for example, articles in Arbërisht about countries outside its development area is not essential, and you may just have a few stub articles for Europe, or the Mediterranean Sea, and for other languages like Italian or Standard Albanian, or their related regional dialects: these stubs should just be there to help organize and correlate the useful content you want to promote). It is much more important to focus on content organisation (and easy navigation) and on relevant sources. Making that "beautiful" can be done later, however avoid long vertical lists without any useful content (lists can be placed in other pages/subpages: it is more important to show normal paragraphs in the language itself): stay focused, this must be a useful and relevant demonstration.

Verdy p (talk)18:42, 25 March 2022

Ok I unterstand. Thank you very much!

Ftillimi (talk)18:55, 25 March 2022