Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Melanesia/Tok Pisin

K. Kellogg-Smith has undertaken an excellent initiative: to bring the Tok Pisin Wikipedia and Tok Pisin Wiktionary back to life. Below I'm copying the beginnings of a discussion on all this (copied from my tpi-pedia talk page - with some editing of my own comments, including using my en-pedia sig here). Hope you don't mind me copying all this here, Ken. Let's continue the discussion from this point. Wantok (toktok) 06:44, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Reorganizing TPI Wikipedia and Wiktionary

A possible proposal to the WikiProject Melanesia group

For the past several weeks now I've been working on the TPI Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and have requested temporary sysop/administrator permissions to help me get the job of reorganizing and revitalizing the two Wikis done.  I'm putting together a proposal for the EN WikiProject Melanesia (of which you are a member) suggesting that a subpage to the main project page be added to discuss policy and direction ideas for the two TPI Wikis, i.e., "Wikipedia:WikiProject Melanesia / Tok Pisin".  I'll also be proposing two subpages to the Tok Pisin subpage, one for each of the two Wikis, i.e., "Wikipedia:WikiProject Melanesia/Tok Pisin/Wikipedia", and "Wikipedia:WikiProject Melanesia/Tok Pisin/Wiktionary" (Note: Done, 02.07.2007 K. Kellogg-Smith).

What I visualize is therefore discussion page about Tok Pisin in general, and then two subpages where there can be discussion about the two Wikis editorial policies and orientation.  Given the target audience, I don't believe that at this initial stage of development it serves any purpose at all to have the TPI Wikipedia be a half-assed clone of the EN Wikipedia.  As I see it, the primary focus of the TPI Wikis should be (again at this stage of development) on Melanesia, and with an important, but secondary focus on the rest of Oceania and the Pacific Rim countries.  I feel that the rest of the world can wait (for the moment anyway), until the two Wikis are well organized and up and running.

Proposed Board of Editors or Editorial Board

As part of getting the subpages set up, I'd also like to propose that an Editorial Board be set up where interested members of the Project Melanesia group would work together to, for a start anyway, (a) agree upon the expected target audience for the two Wikis, (b) agree upon the scope and objectives of the TPI Wikipedia, (c) agree upon the general editorial content, vocabulary level, word-spelling and amount of English code switching/swapping generally allowable in the TPI Wiki's articles.

My Objective

My objective is to tout a bilingual TPI Wikipedia, and a bilingual TPI Wiktionary.  My reasoning is that tok pisin since there's a sizeable amount of switching between English and tok pisin in written and conversational tok pisin, that the two bilingual Wikis would be much more helpful to the general public (either by direct Internet access, or from those who do). I think I'm right about this, but am I?

Bilingual Wikipedia and Wiktionary: Testing the concept

Anyway, I've gone ahead and set up two psuedo-bilingual articles in this Wikipedia. One is "Papua Niugini" and it's English psuedo-equivalent at "Papua Niugini/English".  The other is "Niu Aialan Ailan and it's English psuedo-equivalant at "Niu Aialan Ailan/English".  Both the English articles are copies from the EN Wikipedia.  They both demonstrate what elements are missing in the TPI Wikipedia, and what needs to be done to make the interlinks viable. I'm using a standard subpage "/English" in each Tok Pisin article for the location of the English-language version of the TP article.

I've also tested making the TPI Wiktionary bilingual. That dictionary is virtually empty (but will soon be filled after I've finished the Tok Pisin to English dictionary I'm compiling from Mahalic's 1969 "Introduction .."), so I've used wanbel as my test word.  For the test I set up a page "Agreement" in the TPI Wiki and copied verbatim the definition from the EN Wiktionary.  In the definition for wanbel I set up two tables, one ostensibly for defining the word in Bislama, Motu/Hiri Moto, and another table for defining the word in contemporary and historically significant non-Melanesian languages (e.g., Bahasa Indonesia, Nederlans, Jerman, etc.).  The TPI dictionary is indeed bilingual; searching for either wanbel or agreement will bring up the appropriate page.  Further, both pages are interlinked, so switching between the two pages can be done quickly.

As an aside, I've also been working with the TPI Wikipedia's front page, which hadn't been updated in more than a year when I started working with it.  I haven't as yet been able to get "behind" the front page yet (don't have the required permissions), but I'm working on that.  On June 12th I submitted a request for temporary sysop/administrator privileges for the two Wiki's, but as yet there's been no action on my request. Anyway, what I've been doing is daily updates of the "Karen afeas" template using transcripts from the Radio Australia's Tok Pisin Internet service.  I've also been updating the "dispela wik" template with photos from the WikiCommons, since there are precious few TP articles (as yet) in the Wiki.  The combination of reading/copying/inserting/proofreading the Radio Australia articles, and listening/reading the ABC's "Time to Talk" articles has increased my understanding of Tok Pisin (along with my Mahalic dictionary work) to where I feel hesitant (but confident) to rewrite a few of the ABC's TP headlines.

Problems with the existing Wikis

The main problem I'm encountering with the existing TPI Wikis is that they are both in a rudimentary state, and very unorganized (especially the Categories).  I've found that none of the templates used are documented in the Wikipedia, and were most likely included by the system developer when the TPI Wikipedia was initially set up.  "Caffelice" very likely worked with the developer in the setting up, but documentation doesn't appear to have been their primary interest.  So right now there's a lot of template finding/documenting that needs to be done, in addition to writing and implementing new (translated) templates.

K. Kellogg-Smith 05:13, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Discussion

• Many thanks indeed for kicking this off - long overdue and sorely needed. I'd be very glad to be part of the discussion and to take on an admin role (we will need several admins I would think).

I agree that WikiProject Melanesia/Tok Pisin is a good place to kick off discussion. As soon as we have a decent core of active contributors/admins back on the tpi sites, of course, the discussion should be on the actual tpi wikipedia and wiktionary rather than on en wikipedia.

Melanesian topics are the obvious place to start in terms of improving coverage and quality, agreed; conversely, the actual audience for a tpi pedia is probably quite interested in things beyond the region, as well; and information about the rest of the world in tpi is lacking even more than tpi information about Melanesia.

It makes sense to have a group to sort out policies and approaches early on. A lot to cover here, and it's crucial to get the basic policies done right.

Bilingual wikipedia: I'm not at all convinced about a bilingual wikipedia, using subpages, to be honest. I don't really see the value of separate English versions of each article, other than perhaps to those learning Tok Pisin (or English). If anything, English tends to be intermixed with tpi inline in print/conversation - a work or phrase added into a Tok Pisin sentence, where the Tok Pisin equivalent would be unworkably convoluted. Is there much advantage over the existing, widely used interwiki system? I think there's much good work to be done in improving and expanding the tpi wikipedia; I'm just not convinced (yet) of the value of the bilingual aspect. Wantok 03:30, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

My only comment here is that the interWiki system returns articles that are topically related, not one-to-one translations.  The related articles in other languages range from one-liner placeholders (like the overwhelming majority of our Wikipedia's "articles"), or well written Wikipedia-formatted articles.  The value of one-to-one bilingual articles in Wikipedia is definitely that they are very useful in learning to write in either language.  And there are plenty of examples of existing monolingual Wikipedias that are either going nowhere or are just struggling to keep alive.  The struggling Hawaiian-only Hawaiian Wikipedia comes to mind, as well as the thirty or so Wikipedias that have only one article in them.  And that's not to mention either the several Wikipedias that are in development in the Incubator (e.g., "Ancient Phoenician" for one).  I'm convinced from the history of this Wikipedia that making our Wikipedia bi-lingual will keep it alive and useful for many readers, and that making it strictly a Tok Pisin encyclopedia will, IMO, send it back to whence it came just a few short weeks ago.  There just aren't that many educated folks that will sit down and write good, intelligent articles in a language that the target audience won't be able to read, either because they can't read, or even if they could, do not have ready access to computers with Internet connections.  I have to think, Matt, that this Wikipedia will be most useful as knowledge sources for students in the lower grade levels, and as a language learning tool for language students, and for expatriates who need to learn the language because their work takes them into rural areas where they will need to use tok pisin to communicate with locals. K. Kellogg-Smith 03:25, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

• Agreed, a very good point about the article contributions - most contributors at this stage are probably not going to be fluent in Tok Pisin. I would hope that would change in future once the wikipedia becomes more widely used by Papua New Guineans. Given most early contributors will be more comfortable in English, a one-to-one relationship makes sense. Here's another possibility: what about taking the approach of having a one-to-one policy with the existing simple English wikipedia, which has 10,000 users and 17,000 articles, rather than writing a whole set of English language articles from scratch? It's pretty well established, and in many respects the language is better suited to direct translation into Tok Pisin than the English Wikipedia. That way we could have PNG-related English-language articles added to simple, and a large base of existing English-language articles ready to translate into Tok Pisin.
  
  Re the audience, I'd very much hope that this would be a real reference encyclopaedia for Papua New Guineans, not a language learning tool for outsiders. I feel that's the primary value of the project. While many urban Papua New Guineans have good English, Tok Pisin is very widely preferred even among the highly educated. And while it probably would not see much use within the school system (as government schools operate in English and some local languages), I think it has a huge potential user base in the broader community that, largely, does not have internet access yet - but that will change. Wantok (toktok) 07:07, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Bilingual wiktionary: I'm also not convinced of the value in undertaking a bilingual dictionary ourselves, beyond the existing interwiki system. Doesn't that meet the need? As an aside, it would be good to keep an eye on tpi within the broader OmegaWiki universal dictionary project (formerly the Wikimedia "Universal Dictionary" project): see the Wikimedia description, the OmegaWiki site, and the OmegaWiki blog. There's an embryonic Tok Pisin portal already been set up at OmegaWiki. Wantok 03:30, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Matt, the OmegaWiki project is very much "embryonic" at this time, and lacking in details of how the developers will handle cross-language definitions like the Websters take a look at credentials on the User pages of the folks that set up that TPI portal in OmegaWiki.  Tell me now, from your own personal experience with tok pisin and with Melanesia and its peoples, if you think those non-nationals are qualified in any way to do anything at all significant with any kind of tok pisin document, much less a full-fleged TPI dictionary?

Re the Mihalic project, keep in mind that, as I understand it, the Mihalic project group's focus is to recreate and compile Fr. Mihalic's definitions in a standardized dictionary format that they've established.  The group's purpose isn't to create a contemporary Tok Pisin dictionary, which of necessity must include terms like "laptop computer", "Internet", "terrorist", and other English loan-words used in everyday conversations, and which you can't find in the Mihalic project's current Mihalic dictionary.  There's nothing wrong in using the words/definitions in the Mihalic dictionary, as they are words in general usage and can't be copyrighted.  What's copyrighted in the Mihalic dictionary is the way the definitions are formatted and presented to the reader.  FYI, within the past few days I've started putting Tok Pisin translations (in parenthesis) of English loan words that are used all the time in Radio Australia's Internet Tok Pisin service.  An interesting example is my tok pisin translation of the term "child sex" (i-mekim puspus long pikinini) as used in today's "Karen afeas" article about Mista Julian Moti, erstwhile Solomon Islands' Attorney General. Also my definition of "swearing-in ceremony" in the same article (i-minim kainkain seremoni i-mekim ol manmeri i-save em bos nau). (I won't be offended if you correct my tok pisin; feel free to do so!).  There are a couple of other online Tok Pisin-English dictionaries besides the Mihalic project's that I've been using in editing the Karen afeas section on the Main page: the TPI/English dictionary at http://www.tok-pisin.com, and (infrequently) an urban pisin dictionary (Port Moresby area) at http://www.June29.com.  I like the tok-pisin dictionary because I can copy/paste words into the search box and quickly come up with definitions.  That dictionary also has the ability to take a group of characters and return definitions for words that have that particular group of characters in them.

What I'd like to see done in our TPI articles is the use of interWiki links be used in TPI articles that will link tok pisin or English words and phrases to those words and phrases in the TPI Wiktionary.  I've been reading the Administrator's guide for setting up interwiki linking to get an idea of how that can be done in our case, but no progress so far.  As to the dictionary's format, I've been reviewing the French Wiktionary, which has an "Anglais" section with most words which gives the English translation of the French definition, i.e., the French dictionary is bi-lingual in English —and also gives translations of French words in other languages as well.

K. Kellogg-Smith 03:25, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

• Re OmegaWiki - yes, embyronic and irrelevant for now. Could be interesting in future.
  

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Your translations - i-mekim puspus long pikinini is not bad though really too vulgar and direct in expression; i mekim pasin nogut long pikinini would be preferred.

Thanks for your review, Matt. It certainly is a great relief to have a native speaker available for cross-checking the tok pisin translations of beginners like me.  Actually though, "puspus" is Fr. Mihalic's first definintion for "sexual intercourse" (<Mihalic, Introduction to New Guinea Pidgin (1969)).  His other two are "pilai" and "maritpasin".  I think his third definition sort of reflects his views as a Catholic priest, i.e., sexual intercourse within marriage.   The tok-pisin website gives the following as translations of sexual intercourse with a woman: hevim seks; wantaim meri; pilai wantaim meri; sutim meri (also in Mihalic Project, "sutim", def. #10); goapim meri (Mihalic Project says the sexual senses of "goapim" now override all other meanings of the word; Webster's online dictionary defines the word as meaning "rape"); paulim meri.  None of the other tok pisin dictionaries that I use include a definition for the act of having sex with a woman.

And this brings up a point of consideration for the TPI Wiktionary: "Good" dictionaries seem repelled at the idea of including "bad" words in their dictionaries.  Considering sex as a primitive, natural urge that crosses all cultures, certainly there must be tok pisin words for words that are "tambu" ("kapu" in Hawaiian) in English language dictionaries, words the missionaries and other good workers would never consider (much less imagine) being in a "good" dictionary.  For example, should not the TPI Wiktionary include tok pisin words for homosexuality, "buggering", incest, same-sex marriage, and the like?  Natural or unnatural, don't tok pisin words for those actions exist?  Native speakers would know the words, I believe.  Culturally speaking, how would a PNG native speaker define the English slang word "bush baby" (a child conceived out of wedlock, i.e., a result of copulating "out in the bushes" outside of marriage, so to speak).  The online Tok Pisin dictionary defines an "illegitimate" child as "pikinini b'long rot", but is that the generally used phrase?  And what are the cultural significance and consequences; should they be included as a subpart of a TPI Wiktionary definition? K. Kellogg-Smith 15:11, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

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i-minim kainkain seremoni i-mekim ol manmeri i-save em bos nau is a bit more problematic: perhaps seremoni bilong makim em long posisen (makim = to mark/honour/identify/initiate). Without the kainkain, which means all kinds of.

I used "kainkain seremoni" advisedly, since it would include all sorts of ceremonies, like baptism, marriage, coming of age, ceremonies performed in festivals and on special occasions et. al. performed in both rural areas and urban areas of PNG.  So to me, using the doubled word instead of the single word conjurs up the idea that an English "swearing in" ceremony is a a special ceremony, similar to the many other special ceremonies the reader may know about. K. Kellogg-Smith 15:11, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

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Re the Revising the Mihalic project - actually, it is about updating, correcting and expanding the Mihalic to create a comprehensive contemporary TP dictionary, not at all just formatting. The final product (which will no doubt be continually revised on the internet) consists of the 1971 Mihalic as a basis, modified and expanded with the entries you can see at the Revising the Mihalic site. There are hundreds of fluent Tok Pisin speakers, both Papua New Guineans and others, involved in it. It's by far the best researched and most comprehensive of the various Tok Pisin efforts around. While the Tok Pisin words and phrases, and their meanings, obviously can't be copyrighted, the specific wording of the definitions/examples probably is, especially if a large number of entries were to be copied/imported verbatim. At present the revisions are Creative-Commons-licenced, and the original is theoretically copyright Divine Word (but that's being negotiated). www.tok-pisin.com is a decent word list, though it does have some errors and numerous omissions. I didn't find anything useful at june29.com - do you have a specific URL?

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Yes, I do. Sorry for not giving you the full URL: http://www.june29.com//HLP/lang/pidgin.html.  Another sometimes useful online dictionary is the Webster's, noted in the Mihalic Project emails (I get the digest of the project emails):

http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/translation/Tok+Pisin .  As noted in the emails, though, the returns are sometimes worthless (i.e., not Tok Pisin).

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Anyway, to return to my two basic questions: what is the value, the purpose, of a new (effectively new, since there's so little yet done in the wiktionary) Tok Pisin dictionary project in parallel with the Mihalic and others? And if there is a Tok Pisin wiktionary, should it be bilingual (like le Wiktionnaire en français, as you point out) or just use interwiki?

On the first question - what is the value, the purpose, of a new Tok Pisin dictionary project? - I'm not saying there is no point; it's a genuine question. There's a lot of work involved in this project and I want to be satisfied that there's a very good reason for it. I can see that one argument is one of licencing: none of the others are GFDL-like - all require attribution at least. Another argument is the advantage of the interwiki system: effectively a many-to-many dictionary, not just Tok Pisin to English. But I think this first question needs resolving before we move on to other issues. Wantok (toktok) 07:07, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

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My view on the TPI Wiktionary is that there's a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done before populating the dictionary starts.  By "infrastructure" I mean things like what CSS "skin" to use (from the skins included in monobook.css)for the look and feel of the TPI dictionary, standardizing the headings on the definition pages, e.g., list/not list the IPA pronunciation, include/not include parts of speech in definitions (whether the word/phrase is a verb/adjective/adverb/preposition or whatever), numbering of different meanings (disambiguation if you will), inclusion of example usages of the word/phrase, include/not include definition of the word in related regional languages or historically related languages, etc.  I set up the "wanbel" definition for trying out some of these infrastructure ideas.

Note also that by using two pages, one for TP and the other for English, word lookups in the search box (or an expanded search box) can be in either TP or English.  No need to select a language, as needs to be done in the online Tok-Pisin dictionary.  Anyway, I'm just a programmer, not a page designer, so I leave the Wiktionary page design to those who'd like to take a shot at doing it.  I would think that there are probably students at PNG University who would be interested in doing that.

I've already checked out using the interwiki links; the bots that set up/add to the language sidebar link the English definition of a word to whatever language happens to have that definition included in it.  For that reason alone, I believe that providing the appropriate definitions on-page is preferable to relying on bots to seting up long lists of interlinks to the world's languages. K. Kellogg-Smith

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A much bigger question in my mind about working on a Tok Pisin dictionary: there is an existing broad community effort that has been happening for years under the Revising the Mihalic project. That's a massive effort involving many linguists and others to bring the Mihalic (for those unfamiliar, that's the Tok Pisin dictionary from the late 1960s by Fr Mihalic, the only substantial TP dictionary to date) up to date and expand it. I am thinking that the community effort involved in building a tpi wiktionary would largely be largely a duplication of work. If anything, it would be great to see the Revising the Mihalic project migrate itself to become the tpi wiktionary, or that the tpi wikionary could import the data from the Mihalic project, but I don't know if that's an option - there are likely to be copyright issues, apart from anything else.

Wantok 03:30, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

• Matt, I think you particularly are a crucial part of this project, as you are the only active and experienced user I know of that toks tru pisin.

I think for this project to be a success, you will need to get it intergrated with schools and learning insitutions actually in PNG. I know Bduke is interested and was involved with UPNG. We should definately involve him in this. Aliasd 04:17, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

• Ken has now set up specific pages for discussion of each: Wikipedia:WikiProject Melanesia/Tok Pisin/Wikipedia and Wikipedia:WikiProject Melanesia/Tok Pisin/Wiktionary. Wantok (toktok) 01:03, 4 July 2007 (UTC)