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"Cease and desist", World Trade Organization says to Wikivoyage; could WikiLang be the next WMF project?

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By The ed17 and Hahc21
The Wikivoyage and World Trade Organization logos.

On 31 May, the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal and Community Advocacy team announced that the Wikivoyage logo would have to be replaced, because it has become the subject of a cease-and-desist letter from the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The logo dispute comes as another entry in Wikivoyage's colorful history. Wikitravel, as it was then known, was created in 2003. When it was acquired by Internet Brands in 2006, the German-language contributors decided to fork, creating the original Wikivoyage. Wikitravel continued unabated until 2012, when frustrated editors decided to fork the site again, rejoining Wikivoyage and moving under the WMF's umbrella. These maneuvers set the stage for a dramatic scene when Internet Brands sued two prominent volunteers who were in favor of the move. When those matters were settled and the initial technical infrastructure was set in place, Wikivoyage was formally relaunched, with its sites covering nine languages, on 15 January.

The current Wikivoyage logo was decided on in a two-round community vote in November and December last year. 41 options were put forward in round one. The winner was then subjected to 24 variations for the second round before being chosen.

While Wikivoyage's logo is derived from the logo for the Italian Wikipedia's Transportation WikiProject, perceived similarities to other logos were brought up during the selection process, albeit jokingly; these suggestions ranged from the original Wikitravel logo to the logos for the WTO and for BBC World News.

The WMF promptly reviewed the community's selection and decided that while there were some shared traits, there were "significant enough differences between the designs and the markets the two organizations occupied for both logos to co-exist" (in the words of Legal Counsel Michelle Paulson). Unfortunately for all involved, this did not occur, and the WTO gave the WMF a deadline of 31 July to change Wikivoyage's logo. This was later extended to 31 August as a result of Paulson's discussions with the WTO's representatives.

A related Wikimedia-l mailing list discussion revolved around whether to legally fight the WTO's move. The WMF said in its original statement that while they see "significant differences" in the two logos, "such arguments are not guaranteed to win if we were to legally oppose this request because there are also some substantial similarities." The WMF's legal team calculated that such a risky fight, coupled with the current logo's age (less than six months) and brand recognition (low), would not be worth the potential gains. Nearly all of the community members there agreed with the WMF's view. English Wikipedia editor Craig Franklin stated in two emails that "Asking the Foundation to play chicken with the lawyers of a major international organisation over a trademark claim on a relatively new and easily replaced logo of ours does not offer a very good risk/reward ratio... / ... [While] the WMF [could be] victorious in court on this sort of issue, the expense would be enormous and the legal team's time is much better spent on things other than fighting battles over non-core principles with international organisations."

Some on-wiki discussion concerning the logo change is taking place on Meta, the global coordinating website for the Wikimedia movement, and a proposed timeline for selecting a new logo has been published.

WikiLang: a new WMF project?

Together, the eight countries in red contain more than 50% of the world's languages. The areas in blue are the most linguistically diverse, underlying the world's vulnerability to linguistic extinction.
In a chilling parallel to the precipitous loss of biodiversity on the planet, globalization is threatening the survival of many of the world's six to seven thousand languages. Geographical isolation is no longer offering the protection it did historically, and speakers of regional and minority languages are increasingly unable to compete with those who speak dominant languages. The scientific consensus is that 50–90% of these small languages will disappear by 2100. National Geographic has estimated that a language dies every 14 days.

A proposal on Meta aims to help combat this loss of rich human cultural identity. The idea is to form a new sister project, called WikiLang. Given a tagline of "the free language resources project" by User:Zylbath—the designer and principal advocate of the proposal, WikiLang's objective is to document, record, share, and teach as many languages as possible. It would also strongly support language revitalization.

WikiLang differs from Wiktionaries in its main goal: Wiktionaries attempt to document lexical items—word definitions—while the WikiLang would aim to move beyond this, to document and become a rich resource for both languages that have already become extinct, and those that are under threat. WikiLang aims to be a multilingual, interwiki bridge between the development processes of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiversity and Wikibooks, by providing a centralized source of documentation about all languages—both lexical and grammatical—that could be expanded on in many useful ways.

Going, going, gone ... the rich panoply of North American language families that used to exist, and in some cases are hanging on against all odds.
WikiLang has received opposition from proponents of the similarly themed OmegaWiki, who are currently attempting to have the Wikimedia Foundation adopt it. OmegaWiki is a multilingual dictionary that aims to "describe all words of all languages with definitions in all languages." While this is very similar to Wiktionary, there are plans to turn OmegaWiki into a Wikidata for the various language Wiktionaries. There are also several other online projects aiming to fill WikiLang's proposed niche. As such, User:ZeaForUs has said that WikiLang should not reinvent the wheel, while several others have wondered just why we should expend effort in reviving or at least recording these languages. The actual benefits are varied—from specific medical remedies derived from plants unknown to non-native speakers, to saving small cultures, to possible future historical investigations (saving records of the languages would prevent problems like those surrounding the Minoan civilization's Linear A and B scripts).

On the other side, User:Amqui defended WikiLang against OmegaWiki, stating that "one point of Wikilang is to make it easy for all languages (even dead ones) to have a place to develop a project", though he admitted his support to add the latter as a WMF wiki. There have also been proposals to merge the two ideas: Kipmaster, the current maintainer of OmegaWiki, underlined the differences in scope (which are, as Ypnypn put it, "OmegaWiki is about words, while WikiLang ... is more about languages"), but believes that there may be enough shared qualities for a merger if they cannot join as separate projects. However, users have come out against his base assumption.

The ultimate destination of both proposals is still unknown. WikiLang has not been put to a community-wide vote yet, and while the OmegaWiki request for comment enjoys strong support, there has been no official word from the Foundation.

In brief

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5 June 2013 (all comments)
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    • Wikipedia has Wikipedia:WikiProject Endangered languages. —Wavelength (talk) 22:16, 6 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Somewhat inactive: the project page and main talk page have a total of one edit so far in 2013. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:46, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • The Incubator could work for endangered languages, if we relaxed our policies about being "notable" and "encyclopedic" to accommodate the type of content that is useful for endangered language learning. The materials needed to learn or document a language are a little different than the pages you would compose to write an encyclopedia. The Wiki for Indigenous Languages is an example of the content a language revitalization wiki needs to provide. They are working with the Yaqui Language community with UCLA programming support. After perusing what's out there for language documentation, I'm finding our Wiki-dictionary options aren't as attractive as Lexique Pro and First Voices, and our wiki audio / video uploads and licensing can be a little cumbersome. However, the photos we have in Commons are rather handy for ethnobotanical picture dictionaries and plant identification. As others have pointed out, it takes a committed community of fluent speakers to make a Wikipedia happen in any language; and people want articles with useful content. Djembayz (talk) 00:55, 10 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Languages are not people; they have no right to exist. The sooner we can all shift to one language, the better for all of us. JRSpriggs (talk) 05:58, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Languages are vastly disparate ways of being human. I suspect you must be a native speaker of English, as this sort of bigoted anglocentric assertion is rarely made nowadays by speakers of any other language. --Orange Mike | Talk 18:39, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • To Orangemike: As to which of us is bigoted, I will allow the reader to judge from the above comments. Language exists for the purpose of allowing people to communicate. Learning another language is a major barrier to overcome before people can achieve that communication. Thus teaching everyone a single common language from childhood would facilitate the purpose of language. On the other hand, maintaining a plethora of mutually incomprehensible languages just impedes human progress. JRSpriggs (talk) 04:44, 8 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • To be fair, you are both very correct. JRSpriggs is right that facilitating communication is a high and worthy aspiration, and one that is best served by universalizing language. But Orangemike is also correct that different languages represent different cultures, and diversity in thinking is also a high and worthy aspiration. I'd say that it's not so much the loss of the languages themselves, but rather the loss of the unique ways of thinking and feeling that the languages represent, that is the true loss. Powers T 20:55, 9 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • However JRSpriggs also claimed that 'maintaining a plethora of mutually incomprehensible languages just impedes human progress'. This is quite questionable since beyond the points you have raised, there is fairly strong research based evidence of the advantages of bilingualism or further multilingualism. We even have an article Cognitive advantages to bilingualism and this is also covered somewhat in Multilingualism. Nil Einne (talk) 21:17, 10 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • "Language exists for the purpose of allowing people to communicate" is like saying transport systems only exist to get us from A to B, yet no one would argue for one type of transport. The view appears to be that language is purely a protocol for communication, with the protocols being interchangeable without loss of a part of the culture, but truly it is a massive over-simplification since language and culture are strongly interconnected. IRWolfie- (talk) 13:06, 11 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • The signal weakness in the statement "Language exists for the purpose of allowing people to communicate" as a justification for encouraging the extinction of languages or dialects is that standardization inevitably engenders the loss of memes - easily recognizable constructs which are lost in translation from one language to another. My own native dialect, Cajun English, has loan words from French, autochthonous North American languages like Choctaw, Chitimachan, Cherokee, Houma and others, Spanish, German, and other European languages spoken by early Louisiana settlers. If JRSpriggs has his way, we lose boucherie, which isn't strictly a party, picnic, blow-out, feast, revel or other celebration or assembly - it's a boucherie. We lose fais-do-do, which isn't, strictly, a boucherie, either. We lose cuyon, we lose pirogue (if we all are made to speak McEnglish as JRSpriggs wants), and a lot of other terms which give life in south Louisiana much of its charm. And we lose so many other memes from other cultures - I can only speak to the culture I came from, and which I will mourn when it's lost. It's probably too late for Cajun French, which probably had 100 dialects, most with their own vocabularies, lost when roads were laid between towns in south Louisiana (state in the United States of America) and electronic communications homogenized spoken language there. My mother had already begun to lose her heritage by acculturation, and in my generation we had stopped learning French except to break the "code" our elders used for private communications. (In a reversal of the process, my wife and I, both polyglots, inadvertently caused our sons, who inherited our ability to pick up new languages, to learn German, Cajun and Metropolitan French and Russian just to understand our private parental conversations.) Sorry, but you'll get MY native language away from me out of my cold, dead frontal lobe.loupgarous (talk) 03:48, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • No worries, JRSpriggs, from now on we'll all speak all Japanese Mandarin all the time. :) Djembayz (talk) 02:08, 11 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Addressing JRSpriggs initial comment. in the American tradition, people have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the most important legally protected right is that of free speech. thus, while a language is not a human being, the right of a person to speak as they please, in the language(s) of their choice, is fundamental and must not be abridged by law, in accordance with the American belief in the principles of the Enlightenment. This is aside from what is a clear advantage to being multilingual, and the value of loan words from other languages which enrich each other and expand how we actually think. We have 1 universal language: that of mathematics and the basic physical/chemical processes. We have 1 dominant language that binds many cultures together: English. Since all language use is translation from what you say or write to how i understand it, even one language may be considered "many" (remember the tv documentary on english needed subtitles for some speakers!) y'all can relax now.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:02, 12 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • The short-lived satellite television series Cajun Justice had to resort to subtitles from difficulties with the local English accent in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, USA (the show's setting). Accent and pronunciation is the issue there, something we haven't considered so far in this discussion. In understanding Cockney English (which the landlord of the Kings Head pub in Battle, E. Sussex, England showed me is just about as difficult as Cajun English for a foreigner like me to follow) you have both accent and vocabulary to contend with.
        • While electronic communication have "flattened" regional accents, I actually can and do speak in at least three North American accents routinely, depending on whether I'm with my neighbor Coloradans, family, or speaking with people elsewhere in North America. I can manage a reasonable facsimile of Received Pronunciation British if I must, and the barmaid at the Kings Head paid me the compliment just before I had to return to the US of saying I'd mastered Cockney (she was being kind, though). You reminded me of accent and pronounciation difficulties, Mercurywoodrose, when you closed your post with Y'all, which is just a variant pronounciation of "you all" that has acquired its own spelling.
        • The United States military also has a unique accent and vocabulary which arose out of necessity - in a hurry, the person on the other end of a low-quality radio or telephone connection had better be able to understand what you're saying the first time around. NATO phonetic alphabet rendering (alfa for "A," bravo for "B," down to X-ray for "X," yankee for "Y," and zulu for "Z") is used when an unusual or hard-to-pronounce word or an acronym HAS to be understood the first time around - it's spelled out in NATO phonetics. There's also a special pacing of words in military voice communications over radio or telephone, three words at a time, to enhance first-time comprehension and reduce the chance of misunderstanding. This has tended to become more important now that military actions over the world commonly involve coalitions of several nations, each of which pronounces various English words differently - the initial reason for the NATO phonetic alphabet, which itself grew out of earlier phonetic schemes developed during the two World Wars of the 20th century - fought between coalitions of nations with different languages. Finally, the US military has a distinctive culture with its own memes, some of which are encoded in acronyms such as FUBAR or SNAFU, or phonetic acronym ejaculations such as November Foxtrot Whisky! (the meaning of which is left as an exercise for the reader).loupgarous (talk) 04:07, 15 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Since I had to look it up, I'll pass along this link to the meaning.  Senator2029 ➔ “Talk”  03:41, 28 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • About the WikiLang story:
      • while I am flattered to be cited, the quote is not from me, it is from User:Ypnypn [1].
      • If you read that page, you will also see that my proposition for merging it with OmegaWiki is only a fallback position, and that as a first choice, I'd prefer for them to be a separate project under the WMF umbrella. Should that not happen, I proposed hosting it at OmegaWiki, rather than having the project not exist at all.
      • What is called in this story the "OmegaWiki vote" is not a vote. It is a request for comments (the page title says it as well). I don't know if there will be a vote. In the end I think it is the WMF which decides if they want to support it or not, and how it should be integrated with the existing projects. We can only make comments.
      • The part about me being the current maintainer of OmegaWiki is true :) --Kipmaster (talk) 08:21, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • In order: that was an editing error—sorry! We originally had the right attribution, but I mixed them up when paring the story down.
        • I've added a clarification regarding this point.
        • You're completely right.
        • Well... one out of four at least. ;-) Thank you for commenting! Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 08:37, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • First time I've seen both logos adjacent: yep, I think the WTO has a case. Why on earth were the same colours chosen? That was asking for trouble. Tony (talk) 09:27, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Is there even one actual linguist commenting on this page? I love Wikipedia's democratic approach, but the idea that "anyone can edit" should never be extended to assume "everyone has some clue what they are talking about". If you don't know linguistics, sorry, but... with all due respect to Wikipedia's philosophy etc., your opinions are still... the nicest word would be "hogwash". I'll stick to that. The idea, forex, that languages are not people and should not be saved........................... there are no polite terms; it is not a noble idea. Various other posts have no proximity to WP:CLUE either. Please go back to editing... whatever it is you edit... I won't venture to guess, but it isn't linguistics. • Serviceable†Villain 02:41, 11 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • Very true that the skill set for self-taught language learners, and for traditional language transmission in the home, is not the same as the skill set for linguistics. Given that the majority of those born in the US have never studied linguistics or reached fluency in a second language, the overall level of discussion here is about what I'd expect. I've been editing by adding current press coverage of language revitalization efforts by Native Americans. If you have academic training in language documentation or second language acquisition, I'd like to hear your opinion on how we can support endangered language communities. Djembayz (talk) 11:35, 12 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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