I highly doubt this would become a laughing stock. This project is actually one of the best, highest-quality, most serious projects I have seen in my three years (short two weeks) as a sysop on Incubator. That doesn't make your questions any less valid; I only share my perspective that this is a serious effort worthy of consideration.

• Just now looking at Catanalysis, I see six contributors with at least 500 edits, four more with at least 100, and four more with at least 50. So this is not a project of only 3–5 people.
• There are close to 5,000 mainspace pages.  Very few are redirects. Many are short, but even those have good bibliographies, which is better than a lot of our projects do.

I would mention two points about Jan's 27 September email to the list:

• "Kotava indeed has an impressive text corpus." Is there a convenient list somewhere?
• I would suggest you consider looking at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotava. It also has sourcing problems, to be sure. But this conlang, unlike many, comes out of the francophone world. So I'm not sure the lack of awareness in the anglophone world is the most appropriate measure of the language.

Steven

Sent from Outlook

---

From: Langcom <langcom-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of MF-Warburg <mfwarburg@googlemail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2019 11:21 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee <langcom@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Kotava Wikipedia

 

I somewhat share the concerns mentioned by Amir and Jan van Steenbergen.
What I would hate to see is that we approve a project and then become a laughing stock because it turns out to be an unserious thing in one way or another.

Is there some proof here of any of: "independently proved number of speakers, use as an auxiliary language outside of online communities created solely for the purpose, usage outside of Wikimedia, publication of works in the language for general sale", as suggested by the admirable Language Proposal Policy?

Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com> schrieb am Di., 5. Nov. 2019, 13:12:

Any other comments other than Michael's repeated approvals? ;-)

If not, we can move forward on this, but I'd like to hear the thoughts of at least a couple more committee members.

tir. 1. okt. 2019 kl. 15:28 skrev Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>:

There seems to be something wrong with my mail server.

> On 30 Sep 2019, at 20:33, MF-Warburg <mfwarburg@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Michael, are you ok?
>
> Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> schrieb am Mo., 30. Sep. 2019, 21:24:
> I support approval.
>
> > On 26 Sep 2019, at 22:47, Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Kotava Wikipedia. Kotava is a conlang created in 1978, mainly known in French-speaking countries (according to the English Wikipedia). They have a very active test wiki in Incubator, with more than 3,000 articles, which makes it bigger than the Novial Wikipedia (which we approved in 2008) and about the same size as the Lingua Franca Nova (LFN) Wikipedia (which we approved in 2017). There are several active users, and sustained activity for many months.
> >
> > Does anyone have reasons for why we should not approve this project?
> >
> > --
> > mvh
> > Jon Harald Søby
> > _______________________________________________
> > Langcom mailing list
> > Langcom@lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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mvh

Jon Harald Søby

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