Hi,
There's the official Language proposal policy: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy
There are also the less official, but pretty useful "Handbooks" for the committee and for the requesters:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Handbook_(requesters) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Handbook_(committee)
I suggest adding a few things there based on the experience of the last few years.
To the "requesters" handbook, I suggest adding the following notes in the beginning of the "Making a new request" section:
# Please create a request only if you speak the language in question and plan to write content in it, or if you are doing on behalf of specific people who do. Requests that don't indicate involvement by people who speak the language will likely be rejected or deleted. # If you read the Language proposal policy, and you think that the language is eligible according to it, you should start writing content in the Incubator as early as possible. You don't have to wait for Language committee's approval for it. Existence of content in the Incubator may help the approval process.
To the "committee" handbook, I suggest the following changes: 1. Add a suggestion to subscribe to [[Talk:Language committee]]. The Subscribe feature has existed for a couple of years already, but I somehow realized that I should subscribe to that page only today.
2. Add the following point to the "Verify as eligible / reject ineligible requests" section: If the request is for a language that may be eligible, verify that it is made by people who know the language and plan to write content in it or are in direct contact with people who are. If not, the request may be rejected or even deleted.
Rationale: People sometimes make requests for languages that they don't know, but about which they are curious for various reasons. This is sometimes done with good intentions, but experience shows that it is not actually effective. Seeing a previously rejected request can be discouraging for people who seriously want to start a new one, so in some cases, it may make more sense to simply delete it, especially if there is no meaningful discussion. We already discussed it on this mailing list a few months ago, and I'd like to make it a bit more formalized.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore