User talk:The Thadman

Hiya Steve! It's nice to see another admin around here (or any other active user, for that matter). :) --3345345335534 01:50, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

I was about to leave you a message on your talk page over the same topic as well, but it seems you beat me to it ;-) I feel that we really need to do something with this Wikipedia incarnation, and I warn you that although my specialty rests upon more ancient forms of Aramaic (Mesopotamian Aramaic to various flavors of Jewish Aramaic all the way up to Classical Syriac), my grasp of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic is fairly good and is growing as I learn more.

What we need to do first, I feel, is to find some way to put together a Community Portal to try and foster an environment for native speakers to spend some time at and encourage them to contribute. Most of the articles around here are sadly only a sentence long or so. I was also thinking of possibly finding some way to open this Wiki up to additional dialects of Neo-Aramaic to increase user-base appeal. I know that this is probably rather ambitious, so let me step off my little soap box and ask, what do you think we should do? :-) -- -ܐܡܪ ܠܝ- Steve Caruso -- 04:37, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry about your Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, mine isn't perfect either. :) Over half of my edits are probably ones correcting my own mistakes (and there are a lot more out there). The good thing is that you have knowledge of the ancient dialects. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic doesn't really have spelling standards, so old spelling is better than made-up spelling. Personally, I think the absolute first thing we need to do is translate the interface/develop the main page. With that, I think the Community Portal will develop and eventually the rest of the wiki. Attracting speakers of different Neo-Aramaic dialects is a great idea, though I wonder to what extent do the dialects share similarities with each other and if we can all understand. --3345345335534 05:45, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

[ܫܚܠܦ] Hey

I'm loving what you did to the main page. Is their a way we can divide our wiki into "science", "religion", "sports", ext.. along with top articles of the month for each category.. That will at least get the site more active and we dont have to continue on seeing the same article on the main page --ܐܬܘܪܝܐ 01:47, 9 ܫܒܛ 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. We should make use of the categories to do so. What I'd really like to do is to start a genuine community portal much like the Village Pump on the English Wikipedia. -- -ܐܡܪ ܠܝ- Steve Caruso -- 20:32, 11 ܫܒܛ 2007 (UTC)

[ܫܚܠܦ] MediaWiki interface for Aramaic

Hi The Thadman. I see you have in the past done some Aramaic localisation of the interface of MediaWiki by editing pages in the namespace MediaWiki. I was wondering if you knew that localisation in this local Wikipedia means that only this Wikipedia can benifit of your efforts for Aramaic.

I am one of the administrators of Betawiki. In this wiki we facilitate localisation of any language for MediaWiki. I was wondering if you were willing to go over there and work on the localisation of Aramaic. From there we will add your translations to the source code of MediaWiki, so that anyone can benefit from your efforts (for example on Wikimedia Commons) and those installing MediaWiki outside Wikimedia projects.

Currently less than 1% of the Aramaic core messages for MediaWiki are available.

If you personally do not want to make the effort, for whichever reason, please do make an effort to try and find 2 or 3 other users that are willing to work on the generic translation for the MediaWiki interface on Betawiki. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Thank you very much for your current and past efforts to put Aramaic on the digital map. Cheers! Siebrand 16:39, 5 November 2007 (UTC)