I am undertaking several things that I previously announced I would do, because there were no further comments on them:
* Rejecting request to close Malagasy Wikibooks—comment by only one LangCom member is not sufficient to constitute consensus to close a project that has no violatons of fundamental rules
* Rejecting two related requests for a Romanized Pashto Wikipedia, suggesting that anyone interested in the idea propose a script conversion gadget to the pswiki community instead.
* Changing the language code on the request for Marwari Wikipedia from mwr (a macrolanguage) to rwr (principle component language of the macrolanguage, also called "Marwari"), and then marking it eligible. All the content of the current test project is in that component language, and it will also be moved. (This will take me a couple of days to finish.)
I'd request MF-W, especially, to look again at the request to close the Wikimedia Macedonia wiki. I'm not sure if wikis like that are actually in the purview of the committee, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to close it officially, anyway. But I do wonder if the wiki should be locked until the leadership situation within WM Macedonia is clarified.
Steven
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Kaya
Well were to now, the noongar community met in good faith every condition
asked of it during 2017 includinng those asked by the committee while I was
in Berlin, In December we posted the final request after completing the
required translations. Following those request we received what can
politely be describe as poor responses.
I wont be in Berlin this year to again find out what new hoops we will be
required to jump through. I can say the outcome has been very poor, there
has been no existent communication from the committee as a committee. At
this stage does the WMAU abandon capturing 50,000 years of Australian
Indigenous knowledge from across 300 countries in their languages.
The ball must now rest with the language committee because there is no way
I could take what little comment we have received back to the wider Noongar
community who daily deal with racism, knowledge appropriation, and being
dismissed.
The greatest lesson at the moment for Australian Indigenous knowledge is
dont engage with Wikimedia Foundation, because despite them acting good
faith the outcomes will be no different to past experiences.
So why did we work with Noongar
- they wanted to work with us, ie language community driven
- its one of the largest language groups
- it has a clearly defined country
- it is supported by 5 Universities
- its the most influential Indigenous languages and culture on any
Australian community with the greatest uptake of indigenous words into the
locally spoken english so much so that both the language spoken and the
Western Australia culture is uniquely identifiable from the rest of
Australia.
- its spoken in some form by 25.m despite the statistics
Our challenges was in knowing that there actually 14 associated dialects,
that they have spellings directly impacted by the european who recorded
them. My process has always been not to use WMF as means of enforcing one
dialect over another, hence why we use a lot of english in the learning and
a reluctance to do further translations because each choice should come
when the community is doing it through consensus not at the hand of
myself....
--
Gideon Digby
Vice President - Wikimedia Australia
M: 0434 986 852
gnangarra(a)wikimedia.org.au
http://wikimedia.org.au
Wikimedia Australia Inc. is an independent charitable organisation which
supports the efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation in Australia. Your
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Gerard is far more opposed to macrolanguage projects than most of the other members here. Consistent with the way Amir put it, we need to be careful just how much we generalize on this topic: We "don't" want macrolanguages, but we also "don't" want projects in languages that are extremely close to each other, such that they're really mutually intelligible. In some such cases, using the macrolanguage is going to be the most expedient approach, both linguistically and politically.
In this particular case, the test project for Marwari is coded with the macrolanguage code (mwr). But as it turns out, the principle constituent language of the macrolanguage is also called "Marwari", albeit with codes rwr (in India, in Devanagari) or mve (in Pakistan, in Perso-Arabic—which Ethnologue says "may or may not be the same as [rwr]"). There are also some related languages within the macrolanguage, some of which have very similar names (e.g., "Merwari", "Mewari").
I'll try to confirm with the one current contributor, but it's entirely possible that this test is entirely in the constituent language Marwari–rwr; in that case, I can change the langcode in the request and mark it eligible. But that said, I wonder if it's really better to do that, or better to let the test continue using the macrolanguage code.
Steven
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Were you intending your question (about activity) to be a reply to this (third set), or to fourth set, where I did make an activity argument?
The only extent to which activity is an argument is that we have been closing requests as stale if either:
* no test was ever created, or
* a test only had a couple of pages created, and those pages were created around the same time the RFL request was made—but the test has been completely dormant since
Until I got up to the request for Wikipedia Tharu, all of these old requests either had
* no meaningful activity later than a month or two after the request was made, or
* plenty of meaningful activity after the request was made.
So they were easy to decide. For Wikipedia Tharu, the test was dormant until a year ago. But since there was recent activity, I went ahead and said "eligible".
Is that a problem? I'd rather mark tests as eligible if possible. I'm marking tests as "rejected-stale" only if they would otherwise be "on hold" indefinitely. We decided a couple of months back that it was better in those cases to close the requests, with an invitation for a new one if a community reappeared.
Steven
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1. Malagasy Wikibooks<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_M…>: Only one LangCom member (Gerard) responded to this. If I interpreted that response correctly, Gerard is OK with locking that project. I can't tell quite how strongly he favors that, though. On the other hand, since the only problem this wiki has is inactivity, I'm not sure that a single member's agreeing to a closure constitutes sufficient support to close. So does anyone else have an opinion about this? If nobody else comments in a week, I'm going to take the position that there was no consensus on the Committee to close the project.
2. Wikimedia Macedonia<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_W…>: There would be no reason to move any content from this to a place like Incubator anyway. Apparently Wikimedia Macedonia was "derecognized" in 2017. A new group has since been formed, and intends to take over as the Wikimedia Macedonia chapter when certain negotiations with WMF are complete. Is a wiki like this within our Committee's purview to close?
* In any event, I have asked a member of the new team how long he thinks it will take for these negotiations to complete. I'm thinking if they will run another year, we should lock the wiki until the new team is in place. If they will run only another couple of months, there is no point to that. MF-Warburg, what does one do about this type of situation?
Steven
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Wikipedia Tharu<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Tharu> (thl): Very small test that was dormant for a long while. But there are 1.5 million speakers, and a page was added last year. So I'm going to mark this eligible.
Romanized Pashto (this request<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Romani…>, as well as this effectively identical request<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Pax%CC…> from January 2012): A relatively large number of people signed on to the two requests, though they did so back in 2011–2012, when the requests were first created. The Romanized Pashto project is supposedly intended to serve the Pashto-speaking diaspora, which apparently uses the Latin transcription. Note the following:
* The enwiki article on Pashto does not really suggest there is a large community of people unable to use the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Nor has anyone suggested on the two request pages that such a community exists. (To be sure, it seems like there are people in the Pashtun diaspora who'd like to see this, but whether there's a community that needs it is a different question.)
* The existing, created Pashto projects are coded with a macrolanguage code. The Romanized test project on Incubator was coded using one of the constituent languages' codes. That test has 17 mainspace pages, the last of which was created over five years ago.
I will wait a week for LangCom comments on these requests. But I don't see why we wouldn't reject both of these in favor of having anyone interested try to create a transliteration script for the existing project.
Wikipedia Kildin Sami<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Kildin…> (sjd). Project has 40 pages. Eligible.
Wikipedia Lakota<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Lakota> (lkt): Test has over 600 pages (including categories and templates). Eligible.
Steven
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