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.