Wikipedia, a Jamaican Jew, and Yak Shaving

For me, writing in Wikipedia is very often a story, within a story, within a story.

I am a member of the Language committee, which examines and approves the creation of editions of Wikipedia in new languages.

Recently we approved the new edition in the Jamaican language—an English-based creole commonly heard in reggae, in which books were published, and into which “the usual suspects” were translated: The New Testament, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Little Prince—and now, Wikipedia.

Since the draft “incubator” Wikipedia in this language conformed to the requirements for creating a full-fledged new domain, I supported the domain’s creation. My work as a language committee member could end here—and I’m a volunteer there to begin with—but I nonetheless decided to shave a yak.

Normal people, when they need a sweater, buy one in a store. I consider shaving a yak.

Some time after a Wikipedia in a new language is created, all the draft articles from the incubator are imported. When that is completed, I go over the list of imported articles and try to see whether there are any that aren’t linked to their counterparts in other languages. With some topics it’s easy by guessing the name of the topic or by looking at the images, and with some others it’s hard. With an English-based creole it’s of course very easy.

And that’s how the Jamaican Wikipedia ended up with only one article that doesn’t have a version in any other language: Aizak Mendiz Belisario.

It was easy enough to understand that this was a Jewish artist who lived in Jamaica in the 19th century. He was already mentioned a couple of times in the English Wikipedia, but there was no whole article about him. So I thought: Jamaican is similar enough to English and I can understand what most of the article is about, and the artist seems notable enough for an encyclopedia, because he was one of the pioneers of art in Jamaica, and because an anthology about him was published recently. And, of course, I am in a team that develops Content Translation—a translation tool for Wikipedia articles. So I decided to translate it to English.

As soon as I started the translation process, I noticed a bug. So I filed it, and because it was so easy to fix, I just fixed it.

Then I started actually translating the article. On the way I learned about the John Canoe festival, and added another spelling variant to the article about it in English; I verified that the book about the artist was actually published (you know, hoaxes happen), and googled for some more information about the artist with the hope of improving the English article further.

Normal people could just say “Fine, that language looks legit, let’s start a Wikipedia in it”. But I actually had to read all the articles in it, and then write a new one, improve another one, fix a bug, and write a blog post about all of it.

So here you go: Isaac Mendes Belisario, in English.

There is a story like this one behind every one of the millions and millions of articles in Wikipedia in all of its languages.

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