Tell us about Belarusian (Taraškievica) Wikipedia

This page belongs to the project Tell us about your Wikipedia.

Name of the Wikipedia

Belarusian (Беларуская) Taraškievica – be-tarask

Questionnaire

Contributors

• Wikimedia Statistics can be difficult to interpret. What is your impression, how many steady contributors do you have?
  • I would say about 10 regular contributors, and about 5 people more or less reqular contributers, but worth to be counted. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • From 10 to 20 regular contributors are detected every month. 5-10 of them make the most of common contribution to Belarusian (Taraškievica) Wikipedia. Wizardist 18:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
• Are your contributors mostly native speakers?
  • The majority of the contributors are native speakers, but we also have contributors who are not native speakers but contribute in Belarusian. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Most of them are. There are also Polish-, Russian-, and Ukrainian-language speakers involved. Wizardist 18:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
• Where do your contributors live (regions/country)?
  • Mostly in Belarus, but we also have contributors from Poland, Ukraine, Russia. There are contributors from other countries, but they are less notable. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
• How common is it that your contributors meet in real life?
  • Meetings like this have never been held yet. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Some meetings held between contributors of our own, Belarusan (official) and Russian wikipedia. --Renessaince 10:58, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • The contributors of our wiki don't have real life contacts, AFAIK. Despite this, 2 inter-Wikipedia (be:, be-x-old:, and ru:) meetings were held this summer. Wizardist 18:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Other Wikipedias

• Do you have special contacts with other Wikipedias (maybe in related languages)?
  • Usually there is no any special contacts. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
• Do you translate a lot from other Wikipedias? Which ones?
  • Can't say “a lot”, but some articles are translated to improve their quality. Normally in this cases articles are taken from Russian, or Polish and Ukrainian Wikipedias (no language barrier, and small language barrier correspondingly), but also from English Wikipedia or combination of all of them. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Organization and support

• Is there a Wikimedia chapter in your country? How does your language relate to it?
  • No. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Just planning to organize. --Renessaince 10:58, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
• Are there work groups in other organizations about Wikipedia?
  • No. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Your Wikipedia and the linguistic community

• Is there a language institution for your language, like an Academy, or a club of people interested in your language? Do you have contact with them?
  • Yes, but it mostly a club of people interested in Taraškievica language norm, since it is not state-supported since 1933. We don’t have a regular contact, but if a language question can't be solved inside the community, there are ways to contact them. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
• Who (else) supports you?
  • Nobody. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
• What does the public outreach for your edition look like? Do you have flyers, give lectures, training etc.?
  • Several articles about our Wikipedia in printed and online media. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
• Do you get feedback from readers?
  • Ocasional negative unreasoned feedback, but growing count of external links and references to our Wikipedia tells us about positive feedback. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes, our Wikipedia articles appear more and more often in search results due to creating articles on prominent thematics. --Renessaince 10:58, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
• What other encyclopedias exist in your language?
  • There are several printed encyclopedias exist, but there is no other public online encyclopedia in Belarusian except Wikipedia. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Several printed encyclopedias/dictionaries are hosted on http://slounik.org but it's not official and dedicated online project. Some encyclopedic content is also present on http://radzima.org. --EugeneZelenko 03:01, 22 May 2009 (UTC)
  • I think we can mention Слоўнік.org here as another one encyclopedia made by volunteer(s). --Renessaince 10:58, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Content

• Does your edition concentrate on certain topics, like your region and language, or Latin Wikipedia on Roman history and Christianity?
  • To my mind the majority of articles related to Belarus (history, geography, etc.), but we try to cover all subjects. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • As well as Belarusan architecture. --Renessaince 10:58, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
• Did your edition enjoy text donations, for example from older encyclopedias?
  • No. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
  • In the end of 2004/2005 many text about cuisine/culture/history of Belarus from «Наша страва», «Энцыклапедыя ВКЛ» and «Энцыклапедыя гісторыі Беларусі» was donated by Алесь Белы. --EugeneZelenko 03:04, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Language

• Is there a generally accepted norm about your language (spelling, dictionary, pronunciation)?
  • Yes, a grammar exists and a number of dictionaries, too. Some different ways exist about how to reproduce some foreign proper names (since we use Cyrillic), but in the case there is no variant in a dictionary, the most popular one is used then. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
• How do you deal with different spellings, dialects etc. (like B.E. lift and A.E. elevator)?
  • There are 2 most general norms (spellings) of Belarusian. There could be some argues about spelling or dictionary between these 2 norms, but I can’t remember that we had any big spelling or dictionary disagreement since the moment after both norms of Belarusian have a separate Wikipedia. —zedlik 22:20, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

See also

• Tell us about your Wikipedia

Links

• Main/Front page of your Wikipedia: http://be-tarask.wikipedia.org