I don't think we're talking about an
interlegibility criterion here, at
least that's not how I understand Jimbo's
proposal. Certainly nobody
objects to separate wikis for the Scandinavian languages. The issue is
not whether native speakers of one language can read material in another
language. It's whether there are native speakers who actually read and
write in this as a literary language at all, as opposed to reading and
writing in some "other" language of which theirs is merely a dialect.
The criterion of Jimbo is not incorrect. Some philology use the same criterion
to distinguish tongues between dialects.
Expanding on Jimbo's point, here's the problem with dialect Wikipedias
(leaving aside, for a moment, the thorny problem of deciding whether
something is a dialect or a language). Dialects tend to be in a similar
position to constructed languages, in that they have no
pre-existing
literature and their orthography has to be invented to a significant
degree. When the standards these establish are missing, we really have
no factual basis from which to write in such a language. Inventing
spelling or grammar while you write the encyclopedia, just like
inventing facts while you write the encyclopedia, is perpetrating an
intellectual fraud and a hoax.
This is not correct: same tongues can became dialects. The sicilian for example
had a very important literature with Frederick II, Duke of Swabia. Also the
occitanic at moment is not used in literature, or in law courts, or in officials
circumstances.
It's wright that a dialect became tongue where it enriches with
"registers",
but a tongue can become dialects when it loses them.
Ilario