Am 09.02.2017 5:00 nachm. schrieb "Milos Rancic" <millosh@gmail.com>:

One issue: voting.

== Voting ==

This is also proposal, so read it and comment if you don't agree or
you want any addition.

1) No voting

1.1) According to the Closing projects policy [1], particular member
of the committee analyzes discussion and, if decides that the project
should be closed, sends the request to WMF Board.

1.2) Clear-cut situations for making a language eligible for Wikimedia
projects: the language has a valid ISO 639-3 code, there are no
significant issues in relation to the language itself, the population
of speakers is significant, request made by a native speaker. In this
case, any committee member can mark language / project eligible.

This is already what we are doing. But if such a case should turn out to be contentious, we would discuss it even after someone marked it as eligible without discussion. At least that would have been my expectation. So if we want to make such a detailed policy, could we please add that as well?

1.3) Approval without obvious formal requirements. No project will be
approved without them.

What does this mean exactly?

2) Simple majority (of those who expressed opinion)

2.1) Eligibility of a language with a valid ISO 639-3 code, but
without significant population of native speakers. (Note: this covers
ancient, constructed, reviving and languages with small number of
speakers.)

Ok, this is our current issue with Lingua Franca Nova and Ancient Greek. Shouldn't we better discuss about the underlying policy regarding constructed and ancient languages? A general rule seems better than the possibility to allow everything by a majority vote.

2.2) Eligibility of a language without a valid ISO 639-3 code, but
valid BCP 47 code. (Note: this covers Ecuadorian Quechua.)

I don't recall that we ever discussed allowing projects with BCP47 codes. Again, isn't this something that should be discussed as a policy?

2.3) Eligibility of a language with significant collision between
prescriptive and descriptive information. (Note: this covers
"macrolangauges".)

2.4) Project approval if not 1.3.

3) 2/3 majority (of those who expressed opinion)

3.1) Any change of the rules, including the committee's role in
possible changes of the Language proposal policy [2] and Closing
projects policy [1].

4) Consensus (of those who expressed opinion)

4.1) A new member of the Language committee should not be opposed by
any of the current committee member.

The combination of 3.1 and 4.1 would be bad insofar as it allows a 2/3 majority to introduce a new member anyway.

But apart from such strategic trickery,

I'd like to comment on the main issue:

Yes, Langcom works with the principle that a proposal is approved unless a member is against it, in which case the proposal dies (it is not exactly rejected, n'est-ce pas?).

At times I have been quite annoyed by it as well. I think however that in general it works quite well. Over the course of the years in which I have been a langcom member now, I sometimes thought about whether the “governance“ could be improved. But my personal conclusion always was: not really. It wouldn't harm to formalize a rule for getting rid of a theoretical trollish member opposing everything without a reason. But apart from that? I'm not really sure that introducing majority voting will help much.