pali:o awen kama sona

Hi! If you've been pointed to this page, it's probably because an editor here has identified some issues with the way you're writing toki pona. We really don't want you to feel demoralized. Enthusiasm is the most valuable resource on a wiki, and we appreciate yours, and want to work with you. However, as the Scots Wikipedia learned, allowing fluency issues to fester can destroy a Wikipedia. While there is a place here for less fluent or even (in some technical or straightforward antivandalism tasks) non-toki-pona-speaking contributors, the core of our editor base must be conversant-to-fluent speakers.

This is no different than any other Wikipedia. However, toki pona's relatively gentle learning curve often causes people to overestimate their own fluency. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It is entirely possible that the way you speak toki pona is adequate for your use cases; for instance, in a small friend group using mixed toki pona and English, someone may become adept in communicating in toki pona a sentence or two at a time, and able to have meaningful conversations that way, but may lack experience at writing out long thoughts with more complex grammatical requirements.

We don't want to scare you away. We'd love to have your help in the future! All we ask is that you keep learning for a while before you continue contributing content here.

Why you might need to improve your fluency

If you're uncertain why you were pointed to this page, you should ask the person who provided the link, but common reasons include:

• Word-for-word translation. Some incorrect content on toki pona has given people the misconception that the language can be treated like a cipher, simply replacing each word in an English sentence with the closest matching toki pona word. This tends to quickly violate basic grammatical rules, with la, e, and li often being completely dropped, pi being misused to mean "of", and en showing up in the wrong places. Even if someone gets their particles right, the word choices are often not reversible.
• Using grammatical constructs that are near-universally considered invalid. While there's a lot of flexibility in how to speak toki pona, that has its limits. A simple example of this would be using e in a sentence with no preceding li, o, subject-mi, or subject-sina. A more complex case, common among people who have mastered the basics of toki pona but need to continue learning how to talk about more complex subjects, is attempting to twist toki pona grammar to support subordinate clauses. For instance, "mi tawa ma pi ale li pona", "mi tawa ma seme ale li pona", and "mi tawa ma e ale li pona" are all considered invalid by almost all speakers of toki pona. (Some experienced speakers may use such constructions as a personal nasa [eccentricity], for instance using the nonstandard particle ki, but will generally understand that this usage is not understood by most others.)
• Frequently missing or misusing particles. While everyone drops a li or la here or there, or absentmindedly uses a redudant pi near a single word, if this is a routine issue it suggests you still need to gain some fluency. The good news is that if you understand how to use these particles and are just sometimes forgetting them, you're probably pretty close to the level you need to be at.
• Simply put, frequently writing things where we have no idea what you're saying. This can be frustrating. Toki pona literally means "simple language", and culturally we encourage people to use as few words as necessary; yet, at the same time, one must use enough detail for the reader to understand. Even fluent speakers will fail at this on occasion—in conversation, clarifying questions about the way a word is being used are not uncommon. But if it's routinely unclear what you're trying to say, this is a sign that you should get some more experience in back-and-forth detailed conversations in toki pona. Voice chats on toki pona Discords can be a good way to build this skill.
• Not being able to communicate in toki pona about this wiki's work. If you need frequent help in English or another toki ike, you are probably not at the level of fluency where you should be contributing content here.

How you can improve

sona.pona.la provides a helpful list of learning resources. Once you have the basics down, the most helpful thing to increase fluency is repetition. Talking to other people in toki pona, both by text and out loud (or best of all, if at all possible, in person) makes it a lot easier to twist your mind to think in a nasin pona. Work on expressing complex or abstract topics. Think of someone who you agree with politically in some ways and disagree with in other ways. How would you express that? How would you describe a given religion's views on the nature of the divine? How would you describe a decision you regret making but that nonetheless turned out okay?

There are ~120 nimi pu. Most fluent speakers use almost all of them with some regularity. Making the most of the nimi pu is important for the task of writing an encyclopedia, where we need to deal with both very abstract and very concrete concepts at times and senses like the abstract wan and the concrete sewi may see more usage than in daily conversation. Think about whether there are nimi pu (or other nimi you see as valid) that you use rarely if ever, and whether you are underusing them.

For minor, but consistent errors, telo misikeke can be a useful tool to spot typos and grammatical mistakes. Be aware that Wikipedia formatting can break its analysis, so copying the final rendered text may be of more use than using the text in the editor.

[If we make a draft namespace this should be mentioned here.]

How you can help in the meantime

There are certain kinds of routine technical tasks, like maintenance of templates and edit filters, that often require no understanding of the local language, and on most Wikimedia wikis are done by people who may even speak none of the language at all. The same is true of straightforward antivandalism. However, if an edit is in toki pona, and you do not fully understand what it means, you should probably leave it to someone else to patrol; note that there is not at present any reliable AI tool for translating from toki pona.

If you are basically conversant in toki pona, you should still be able to make simple improvements to articles. If you're unsure, it's best to talk to a more experienced editor about whether that's a good idea. Listen to what the community is saying and you can't go wrong.

The unpleasant bit

Our goal is to help you find the tools you need to be better at toki pona. There's lots of people in this community who would love to help you with that, and so this should never have to be an adversarial process.

That said, if an editor needs to be repeatedly cautioned about fluency issues, to the extent that it is damaging the encyclopedic effort, administrative tools may be used to limit their editing abilities until the matter is resolved. This may consist of a temporary or indefinite block from the site or from its reader-facing namespaces.