Portuguese Citizendium

[River]

Sergio, your ideas are exaggerated and that´s not the way to start a Brazilian / Portuguese Citizendium.

[River]

For the most of things we have to wait for English version be started, then see what can be done. I think that the best way to start Citizendium in Portuguese is with translation from the original in English.

[SebastianBreitschafter]

I must agree River, that these ideas are quite problematic. Especially the proposal to reject people who have contributed or who still are contributing to Wikipedia. Because we should be glad about people who spend their free time for working on the new project, without assuming that they won't contribute in an acceptable way. It's exactly that barred behavior of the wikipedian community that makes Citizendium possible at all. Even though we want to create the contents in a more professional way, we must welcome new members with open arms.

[Nat Krause]

A couple thoughts about steps that might be taken to ameliorate situations like the Portuguese wiki.

1) A technical solution worked very well on the Chinese Wikipedia for the problem of traditional vs. simplified characters. This was once a very polarising issue for them, to the extent that some people even went to the lengths of starting a short-lived Traditional Chinese Wikipedia. However, everybody's happy now that they implemented a technical solution, which makes it possible for each user to set his or her preferences to "traditional" or "simplified" characters. Something like this might be feasible for Portuguese. A technical solution has two parts:

a) automatic: the computermind scans the text, just like a spell-checker, and identifies words that are used only in BP or EP. If the user has set his or her preferences to the other version, it then displays the appropriate spelling instead. Thus, we could have it so that a Portuguese person sees "Câmbrico" while a Brazilian sees "Cambriano", even though they are looking at the same article. Clearly, this works well for vocabulary that is different, but less well if at all for grammar differences.

b) manual: if editors care to do so, they can manually set the text to have two different versions. The syntax for this would be something like {b=ele me viu p=ele viu-me}, which would cause "ele me viu" to display for Brazilian readers but "ele viu-me" to display for Portuguese readers.

2) A less radical solution (and one that could operate together with the first) is for a Portuguese wiki to work toward compromise phrasings where possible. Thus, if there are two ways of saying a phrase, X which is preferred by Portuguese people but unintelligible to Brazilians, and Y which is used by Brazillians and is also somewhat familiar to Portuguese, the wiki's Style Guide could mandate the use of Y by all writers. Likewise, if there is a version X preferred by Portuguese, a version Y preferred by Brazilians, and a version Z preferred by neither but understandable to both, the Style Guide would require the use of Z. In this way the Portuguese Citizendium Style Guide would work toward a new neutral written form, combining aspects of both Portuguese dialects. While this might, in practice, lead to more Brazilian expressions being used, it would also discourage the use of the Brazilian forms which might be most confusing to Portuguese people, when possible.

3) Generally (and you guys already know this) you must cultivate an atmosphere of openness and collegiality, so that, even when it becomes necessary to alter someone else's style of language, this can be done without having it become a personal conflict.

[Sergio Luis]

These technical solutions may be feasible for the linguistic differences, but they will fail to address the ego problem, that is the main question in PT WP - and may also be in the PT CZ, if several contributors migrate from one project to the other. The language itself is a minor question: in Wikipédia, it always serves just as an excuse for some pitbulls do what they like the most to do. The big question for me is how to prevent this from happen.

Indeed, the question Brazilian vs. Portugal's Portuguese itself has the simplest and ultimate solution, although not a very polite one. It's just letting the authors rewrite the articles and convert them from one flavor of the language to other at will. (Just what Wikipédia forbids.) In time, each article would stabilize either in Brazilian or in Portugal's Portuguese, depending on what country the major contributors to the article are from.

No sane Brazilian would dare to re-edit the "Lisboa" article in Brazilian Portuguese, neither a Portuguese would do the reverse thing to the "Carnaval" article. And in neutral subjects, like natural sciences, the group who gathers the most authors would impose its own version of the language to the other. It would be a kind of natural selection...

[River]

i keep with my opinion.

Sergio, your ideas are exaggerated.

[Larry Sanger]

This is a fascinating discussion (really) and I have no idea how to resolve the matter, but the issues are very interesting.  Clearly, if there were a technical solution available, and it were really feasible, grand.  We might help ourselves to the same tools, to answer the BrE vs. AmE question.  It would certainly make the ego problems rather less.  But those ego problems, well, they certainly can be serious, and they must not be discounted.

[Roberto Cruz]

I hope to see Citizendium in a Portuguese version soon.

In Wiki.pt it's forbiden to translate a word written originally in Brazilian Portuguese to Euro Portuguese, and vice versa. There're many articles plenty of words from these two major variants of the language and we didn't have problems with this. 

[Amauri Alves da Silva]

Hi everybody.

I'm a Brazilian translator and I think that would be good to translate articles originally from English into Portuguese and to produce new articles from scratch in Portuguese.

Differences between PT PT and BR PT? Yes, it exists, but I think if we keep the article in a good standard Portuguese (Brazilian or Portuguese one), it will be understandable by everyone.

Of course, after translating an originally English article it will start to road in a different way than the original one, since Native Portuguese Speakers only authors would start editing the text. Does anyone realize this could be a problem at all?

[Joe Quick]

Of course, after translating an originally English article it will start to road in a different way than the original one, since Native Portuguese Speakers only authors would start editing the text. Does anyone realize this could be a problem at all?

Hi Amauri, boa vinda a Citizendium!

I don't see that as a problem.  As a translator, you know that some ideas take on a whole new shape when they make the transition from one language to another.  It's absolutely natural that articles will develop in different directions in different languages and we should embrace that.

[ricardodefaria]

I hope to see Citizendium in a Portuguese version soon.

In Wiki.pt it's forbiden to translate a word written originally in Brazilian Portuguese to Euro Portuguese, and vice versa. There're many articles plenty of words from these two major variants of the language and we didn't have problems with this. 

Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographic_Agreement_of_1990 globally unifying Portuguese was finally approved this 2009 in Brazil and same now is already law in Brazil. Portuguese Parliament also approved it last 2008 - we now wait its ratification by Portugal's Executive branch of Government: Chances are that the 400 million Portuguese speaking people in the world will, finally have an unified Portuguese language before 2010.

[Peter Schmitt]

Chances are that the 400 million Portuguese speaking people in the world will, finally have an unified Portuguese language before 2010.

I do not speak Portuguese, so I am not concerned. However, are you sure that this is positive?
British and American English coexist quite well, and spelling is also an expression of tradition.
We, in German speaking countries suffer under the consequences of an orthography reform initiated by politicians.