On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 2:20 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
2017-02-07 15:08 GMT+02:00 Michael Everson everson@evertype.com:
On 6 Feb 2017, at 21:45, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
I am in favor of making LangCom a normal democratic body: 50%+1 (of those who voted) for regular decisions, 2/3 majority (of those who voted) for changing the rules. ("Of those who voted" because we have u number of inactive members.)
I would support this.
In general, I'm not a fan of voting about issues in Wikipedia. Democracy is good for countries, but not necessarily for an encyclopedia. The English Wikipedia has a pretty clear practice of not deciding about pretty much anything by vote count. My home wiki the Hebrew Wikipedia is quite different, and a lot of things are decided by a vote there; I consider it wrong, and never participate in such votes.
For Langcom, a voting policy will possibly make sense for areas where there is space for opinion, such as a prediction of a project's viability, perceived incubator activity, new members, or whether to approve a constructed language. These things are hard to measure precisely. Also, for questions such as whether to approve a project with a macro-language code or not. At the moment it's possible that one opposing committee member will block progress without even having to explain their opinion, and this is not great.
Amir, Language committee is not a Wikipedia :P We could just fool ourselves by saying that we are not making political decisions [based on linguistic facts].
There are a couple of paradigms because we are making political decisions.
1. The first is related to the structural political influence over the standardization bodies. Language is an important part of national identity => national institutions won't recognize some obvious facts => international standardization institutions would either automatically listen to the national institutions or they will be pressured to make a decision which particular national institution would prefer.
We don't need to move into the hotter areas: just the recent case of Elfdalian in liberal Sweden could be paradigmatic for that type of decisions.
By making a decision contrary or harmonized with the position of a national (or international) institution, we are making political decision.
But this type of issues is the simplest one. In this case we are making the best expert decision, based on linguistic facts. However, no matter if our decision has good basis in scientific consensus, we are making a political decision anyway.
2. The second one is related to the scientific consensus itself. Unlike in, let's say, thermodynamics scientific consensus in marking something a language or not is significantly tinier even without structural political influence over the international bodies.
Let's take as an example Romany languages. We have two serious issues to solve in this case.
2.1. The first one is related to the actual knowledge we have about Romany languages. SIL/Ethnologue have totally different categorization of Romany languages from at least the point of former Yugoslavian and Bulgarian linguistics. (I felt like I prepared wrong lectures for exam when I went to the main Romany linguist in Serbia with Ethnologue-based knowledge.)
Note that we are talking in this case about the following languages, according to SIL/Ethnologue:
1) Romany "macrolanguage" [1] 2) Balkan Romany [2] 3) Baltic Romany [3] 4) Carpathian Romany [4] 5) Kalo Finnish Romany [5] 6) Sinte Romany [6] 7) Vlax Romany [7] 8) Welsh Romany [8] 9) Lomavren [9] 10) Erromintxela [10] 11) Traveller Dannish [11] 12) Angloromani [12] 13) Romano-Greek [13] 14) Calo [14] 15) Norwegian Traveller [15] 16) Romano-Serbian [16] 17) Tavringer Romani [17]
I know that common Roma population of Belgrade (speakers of either Balkan Romany or "Romano-Serbian", according to Ethnologue) treat as "close others" Vlax Romani (although not in linguistic sense) and "not us" likely Sinte Romany population.
However, according to Serbian (and former Yugoslavian) linguistics, there is *one* Romany language and there is definitely no mixed language called "Romano-Serbian".
We have Vlax Romany Wikipedia [18] (with 582 articles; created before Language committee) and request [19] / Incubator [20] for Wikipedia in Balkan Romany, which has been made eligible in 2007.
*Any* decision that we make here is or would be political. Besides the fact that we have no clue what should be actually done. For example, is it reasonable to treat them as one language and insist on one Wikipedia? The main split from Balkans happened in 15th century, meaning that the most of the varieties should be closer than English and Scots are (12th century).
It is normal that we have elaborated and educated different opinions. It is normal that any of us has a strong opinion in one way: For example, Oliver could strongly support SIL/Ethnologue, I could strongly support local linguistics. It's simply irrational to wait either Oliver or me to change the opinion and unblock particular set of possible Wikipedias.
2.2. Standardization
Roma people haven't passed through the process of creation of the national identity. They are doing that now. And, as we know, language is important part of the national identity. And not any language, but standardized language, taught in schools all over the areas where the population is present.
However, postmodern approach is that the children should learn in their native language [variety], which could be different enough from the standard and could be treated as a foreign language (obviously, not as distant as Swiss German vs. Standard German, but distant enough to be treated as a non-native variety).
Do Roma people need 17 Wikipedias or just one? OK, not 17 -- some of the language varieties are spoken by few dozens or few hundreds of people --, but 2, 5, 10?
Again, any decision that we make is a political one. All reasonable approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Would you support children to learn in their native language and immediately enjoy positive consequences of having basic education in native language or standardization process, which would give to Roma in the future more political power?
That's again political decision. I could have a strong position towards one approach, you could have a strong position towards another approach; and both approaches are quite valid ones. Just because we have consensus-based decision-making, we could block all the approaches in Wikimedia environment and that's the worst thing we could do.
3. The third major reason is related to the significance of Wikipedia in contemporary civilization. By making decision to do one thing or another, we are quite likely giving significant advantage to our preferred option.
Here is one hot topic to illustrate real political, even life-and-death consequences of our decision.
Zaza is Kurdish subethnicity, which is in the process of separating themselves from Kurds. The process is at the beginning. It could become more influential or it could vanish in relatively near future.
Zaza is a language of different branch of Northwestern I languages from Kurdish (and possibly related to the Caspian languages).
But they were not at all linguistically oppressed inside of the Kurdish population. Kurdish newspapers are bilingual: in Kurdish and Zaza. Kurds even standardized Zaza language. (This article is good to read for the context [21].)
However, during the last 10-20 years, there is a concurrent institution called "Zazaki Institute" [22], which built a separate standard. We have a low level conflict on Meta and Translatewiki which lasts for a decade (start here [23][24]).
Sooner or later we will have to make our decision, without bureaucratic excuses. And that decision is going to be very political.
The options are: (1) De facto support Kurdish national unity and significantly influence likely valid right to self-determination of one ethnicity. (2) De facto support self-determination right and likely position ourselves on the line with Turkish intelligence agencies.
No matter what we decide, it will be political. We could have different opinions in relation to the Kurdish right to self-determination (in relation to Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran) and we could have different opinions in relation to the Zaza right to self-determination (in relation to Kurds).
It is obvious that we would have to think much more deeply about this issue than about the standardization. However, political decisions should be made politically, not bureaucratically. There is the real world outside, our decisions influence it and we should stop avoiding that responsibility.
For more clear-cut questions such as whether to approve a project in a language without an ISO code, there shouldn't be a vote—it should be an immediate rejection.
BCP 47 is often the only reasonable way to make something working. For example, although we didn't make decision in relation to that, but Belarusian Tarashkevitsa is a legitimate written variety and there is no easy translation engine between the official standard and Tarashkevitsa. (Logic goes: Standard Belarusian is official in Belarus; however, Russian is the native language for the most of those who use standard; majority of those who actually use Belarusian use Tarashkevitsa.)
Take a look into the list of Quechuan languages [25]. It's a primary group (according to the traditional, non-Greenberg categorization) of 44 languages (according to SIL/Ethnologue). Those 44 languages are spoken by ~8 million people.
But not just that. At least Ecuador is working on one, standardized language to be used by Quechua population in Ecuador. And unlike the relation between Chile and Mapuche, it seems that the indigenous population has positive attitude to the standardization.
What would be the code if they come and ask us for Wikipedia? Should we choose a code for a random Quechua language spoken in Ecuador? Should we wait for JAC, which could take years? Isn't it much more reasonable to give them BCP 47 code "qu-ec" and change it when JAC standardize it?
Any language which have two scripts and population. North and South Azerbaijani division is a joke. If blocked Turkish Wikipedians could go to Azerbaijani Wikipedia and edit there, then the differences between Azerbaijani spoken varieties are quite small (an average Serbian Wikipedian wouldn't be able to go to Macedonian, Bulgarian or Slovenian Wikipedia). We were just lucky that there is a separate code, which could be used for the other written variety (although I am still of opinion that one Azerbaijani Wikipedia is enough). The right code for Azerbaijani variety written in Arabic script is "az-arab", not "azb".
I am sure it's similar with the difference between Central and Peripheral Mongolian. (But there are significantly less troubles in switching from left-to-right to right-to-left in comparison to switching from left-to-right to top-to-down.) We could use wrong code for Mongolian written in Mongolian script, if it's a matter of would we have that project or not, but the right code for that project is "mn-mong".
4. We have the rules, which could and should be changed from time to time. What we want is also political and we should have the process which would include everybody's positions. But, eventually, we shouldn't depend on ability of one person -- even it could be myself -- to block the changes about everybody else agree.
5. Fortunately for Affiliations committee, it is not the most dysfunctional Wikimedia committee as long as Language committee exists under the rule of consensus. There are many things which we missed because it's either not possible to do or it costs too much efforts.
6. While inactive members do not make any trouble, I don't think that we should create the House of Lords here. If somebody is not able to give minimum inputs for approximately the time of LangCom's existence, something is wrong with our structure. And it's not about deciding who will be a member of LangCom or not, but about creating rules that would be applied for everybody.
[1] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rom [2] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmn [3] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rml [4] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmc [5] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmf [6] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmo [7] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmy [8] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmw [9] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmi [10] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/emx [11] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmd [12] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rme [13] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rge [14] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmq [15] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmg [16] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rsb [17] https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rmu [18] https://rmy.wikipedia.org/ [19] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Balkan_... [20] https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/rmn [21] http://www.zazaki.net/yazdir/haber/the-zazas-a-kurdish-sub-ethnic-group-or-s... [22] http://zazaki-institut.de/ [23] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Zazaki_wikipedia [24] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Standar... [25] http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=que