https://ga.wikipedia.org/ is the Irish Wikipedia, or Vicipéad. It currently has 53,750 articles, compared to over 100× that for the leagan béarla.

The Irish Wikipedia is great in a lot of ways. It is perhaps the biggest book ever written in the Irish language. But it has some problems: a lot of articles are far too short, some look ugly, some have bad Irish.

The thing is: these problems could be overhauled by about a dozen editors le díocas in just one year. Then we'd have an amazing resource for learners, and for anyone who wants to spend time engaging with the language. If you're anything like me, you've spent hundreds of hours reading Wikipedia throughout your life; just imagine if people could do this trí nGaeilge!

If you're not great at Irish yet, you have a role to play as well. It is a big help if you can translate/write articles to the best of your ability and tag them for proofreading: https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicip%C3% ... h_learners – and this is a great way to learn because you get to see the corrections that other editors make to your work.

This is a horrible idea, see: Scots Wikipedia. Besides, there's not enough people with quality Irish to do it, and the amount of bad Irish out there is quite high; it's easier to find bad Irish than good Irish, even. And having people with little to no Irish directly translate, which is a skill that must be taught in and of itself, just screams a recipe for disaster. Especially if there's not many people actually proofing the articles.

We don't need another repeat of the Scots Wiki.

Just being a native speaker won't always be an option either even for those that would want to help.

I'm an Irish native speaker and I'm absolute shite at spelling and explaining grammar.
Which is typical of a lot of native speakers of any language. Would everybody whose first language is English be able to contribute to an English grammar section either?

Correcting bad Irish wastes a lot of time.
I'm a bit obsessive and so I spent much time correcting the worst grammar mistakes in hundreds of Vicipéid articles. (Most of these articles are short, one or two sentences, buíochas le Dia!)
Often people don't even use the correct gender of nouns, using all the time "é" (even in cases like "fuinneog", the last edit I remember. "Is ... é fuinneog" doesn't make sense at all. (ceart: Is ... í an fhuinneog)
But such wrong syntax existed for 9 years or so without anyone correcting it. .

Someone who doesn't know words in -eog being feminine, who doesn't know when to use an t-alt shouldn't write articles at all.

Brilliant. Thanks for your work. Tá níos mó de do leithéid ag teastáil!

Bígí cróga!

PS: as a lot of you are stressing the importance of proofreading/correction, this is a good place to start looking for that: https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catag%C3% ... dh%C3%ADth

Like I say, a dozen dedicated editors would make all the difference.

Tá an Vicipéid Ghaedhlic lán meancógaí siocair nach bhfuil Gaedhlic (scríobhtha) cheart ag an chuid is mó do na Gaedhliceóirí féin... Is iomaidh duine a chreideas go bhfuil Gaedhlic mhaith aige agus a ghníos físeáin i nGaedhlic, go h-áiríd d'fhoghlaimeóirí ach tá na físeáin sin lán meancógaí... so foghlaimeann siad seo rudaí míchearta srl srl. Ní thuigim sin. Ní scríobhfainn féin ailt i dteangaidh nach bhfuil ar mo thoil agam...

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

The cool thing is all these problems are free for anyone to correct.

There's only so many articles there, so if we had a dozen, or a couple of dozen, people like Labhrás beavering away fixing errors, we could get it shipshape in a year.

It'd be bad to leave those errors hanging, when we can just click and correct them for free.

I don't think you understand how time consuming it is to correct articles, or how few people actually have a decent enough ability in Irish or a desire to fix it. It's better to just let those people write articles to begin with, instead of learners, which is really a case of the blind leading the blind. And, as I mentioned, it takes skill to be a translator. That's why there's full University-level degrees associated with it and many other diploma courses as well. Wikipedia's "Be Brave" policy works great for *majority* languages, where there's plenty of speakers who have an interest and ability to fix it...For Irish, that doesn't exist. It's literally going to be a repeat of the Scots situation, except with people who think they actually have good Irish but really only have "English in Irish drag" as one linguist puts it. It's not a good idea, at all, and does harm to learners who try to use it to learn, where they learn it incorrectly. It's just like Scots situation, but worse as it wouldn't get called out like Scots as most people who read it have a similar level of Irish, and wouldn't recognize the mistakes and that it isn't good.

Yeah, the time that people put into it is staggering and very inspiring. I remember reading an estimate of the amount of time put into it: I believe it's hundreds of millions of man-hours, maybe a billion. (PS: found this PDF of a survey that said they spend 8.27 hours per person per week)



I agree it'll do harm if errors are left up without good editors correcting them. So how to proceed? I'm making a point of bringing the situation to the attention of as many Gaelgeoirí as I can. Like I say, we only need about a dozen more people. There are maybe 5-10 active editors currently.

I would correct articles and translate new ones if I had time... I did that a few times.
But it takes more time to correct wrong articles than to write/translate new ones directly...

_________________
Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne