Tell us about Northern Sami Wikipedia

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Northern Sámi Wikipedia

Wikimedia Statistics can be difficult to interpret. What is your impression, how many steady contributors do you have?
- 2.

Are your contributors mostly native speakers?
- There was a native speaker, but she got frustrated and left.

Where do your contributors live (regions/country)?
- For a while, it was two contributors in Finland, with some help from Norway every once in a while. Nowadays though, the two contributors are on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with one in Finland and on in the USA.

How common is it that your contributors meet in real life?
- Some of us have meant in real life through non-wiki projects.

Do you have special contacts with another Wikipedias (maybe in related languages)?
- Not really.

Do you translate a lot from other Wikipedias?
- Yes, almost everything has been translated from the Finnish, Norwegian (both Bokmål and Nynorsk) and English wikipedias. If an article doesn't exist in one of those wikis and it is being added to the Northern Sámi wiki, I try to add a translation of the article into both the Finnish and English wikis.

Is there a Wikimedia chapter in your country?
- Wikimedia Norge (Norway) actively supports the Wiki, although the effect it has had is uncertain. Not much has been done with the Wikimedia Suomi (Finland) chapter due to a lack of time.

How does your language relate to it?
- Norwegian is not related to Northern Sámi at all, although it has supplied a lot of Northern Sámi's loan words. Finnish is a related language.

Is there a language institution for your language, like an Academy, or a club of people interested in your language? Do you have contact with them?
- There are some, but they're either not interested or don't have the time/funds/etc. to participate. One major contribution though has been the development of the Divvun spellchecker, which helps people who were uncertain about their spelling to check it before adding it to the wiki. Other material by Giellatekno at the University of Tromso in Norway also alleviates the fears felt by potential contributors (including this one!).

What does the public outreach for your edition look like? Do you have flyers, give lectures, trainings etc.?
- No, because our time goes into trying to create content for the Wiki.

Does your edition concentrates on certain topics, like your region and language, or Latin Wikipedia on Roman history and Christianity?
- The main topics that we concentrate on are music, the Sámi community and culture, and languages.

Did your edition enjoy text donations, for example from older encyclopedias?
- No.

Is there a generally accepted norm about your language (spelling, dictionary, pronunciation)?
- No, as it is spread across 3 different countries.

How do you deal with different spellings, dialects etc. (like B.E. lift and A.E. elevator)?
- People can write in whichever spelling/dialect they like as far as I'm concerned as long as they write something. If it is far off of what is starting to be the norm for the language, then we might consider some way of adding in the more common words in their text to facilitate comprehension. One other special feature of the Northern Sámi wikipedia is that a lot of the nature-related articles also have the terms in other Sámi languages, as none of them have their own wikipedia yet.
- At one point in time there was a discussion about how to say prime minister, as Norwegian Sámi have a different term (borrowed from the Norwegian term) than the Finnish Sámi do (borrowed from the Finnish term). As there are more Northern Sámi speakers in Norway, we decided to go with the Norwegian term, except for when referring to Finnish prime ministers, in which case the Finnish Sámi term is used.
- Another time when there has been some problem is with categories, as users might not realize that the category exists because they're using a different term, so I've taken to creating categories that have more than one synonymous term in it. So far, it's worked.