To respond to Michael's message of about 9:45 pm last evening (UTC), only one project
is being held up right now (over this discussion), namely LFN Wikipedia.
Perhaps there should be further discussion on refining requirements around conlangs. But
for a variety of reasons, I think we need to go ahead and release this project and get a
phabricator task underway for it. Here is why I say so:
* First and foremost at this point, no matter what else anyone might say about this,
the formal discussion about the approval of this project was open for seven days, nobody
objected, and I announced the project approved, pending language verification, fully
according to this committee's rules. Then people affirmed language verification, and I
announced the project completely approved, fully according to this committee's rules.
Only then did objections begin to appear. And then at that, MF-Warburg acknowledged that
he didn't really think it would be appropriate to reverse the approval, because the
approval had been according to this committee's rules. Only Gerard asked to walk back
the approval, notwithstanding the rules. I'm sorry, but the community worked hard to
get the project ready, and I was extremely careful in moving the nomination through by the
book, because I knew that conlangs have been controversial in the past. I really gave the
committee every chance to respond (and object) in a timely fashion. But the broad
community of people we serve as the Language Committee has a right to believe that we will
act according to our own rules, and that we will not appear to be capricious or arbitrary
about doing so. For that reason, regardless of whether or not the committee wants to
modify the rules on conlangs going forward, I think we need to go ahead and release this
project as approved.
* Second, I can tell you that there is no other conlang project even close to
approvable now by current standards, so there is time to discuss conlangs further before
this question would come up again. Consider the following data (available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:StevenJ81/sandbox/Conlang):
There are 21 conlangs with language codes. Of those, seven (7) already have full
Wikipedias, and another five (5) are art languages (like Klingon, Quenya and Sindarin).
That means that exactly nine (9) other conlangs can even possibly be discussed right now
under the current standards. One is LFN. One is Kotava, which has about 100 pages in
Incubator, but fewer than 100 speakers. Two others have one page each, and the other five
have no content at all. So besides LFN, no other project can possibly come up for
discussion in the near future under the current standards.
On my data page, the only two other conlangs having no language code but at least 200
speakers (making them as large as Ido, third-largest conlang with a Wikipedia) are Toki
Pona and Interslavic. Toki Pona does have an SIL application pending now, and if it is
approved, we could potentiallly have to deal with that in the next year or so. But
Interslavic does not have an application. Any change we may discuss may want to keep Toki
Pona in mind.
Steven
PS: Two other projects are also waiting now for language verification: Wikipedias in
Gorontalo and Ingush. I think Milos has been trying to get in touch with the language
experts that have been identified in those cases.
Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>