Dear Language Committee,

Please allow me, being a non-member but a long-time follower of LangCom, to make a request on behalf of the Interslavic community. Interslavic is an auxiliary Slavic language, intended to be intelligible to speakers of any Slavic language. With a community of ca. 25,000 users and interested bystanders, Interslavic is by far the largest and most active constructed language project after Esperanto nowadays. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interslavic for details.

Interslavic has had its own Wikipedia-inspired wiki since 2007. Currently, it is hosted at Miraheze and has nearly 500 articles, most of which are rather decent in size. In addition, it features an elaborate system for transliteration between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, as well as several other gadgets and modules.

In April of this year, Interslavic received an ISO 639-3 code (isv). Soon after, a request was filed for an Interslavic Wikipedia at Meta, and an Interslavic Wikipedia edition was started in the Incubator. The logical next step would be transferring the contents of our wiki at Miraheze to the Incubator. This, however, turns out to be more complicated than expected, and as a result, we are kind of stuck in limbo right now.

First of all, having two wikis with partially overlapping content is most inconvenient, with some contributors working in the old wiki and others in the Incubator. An additional problem is that some people have started copying articles manually, whereas everything should be imported along with page histories instead. Once import is done, the idea is to close or even delete the old wiki.

Secondly, I've been told that automated translation cannot be implemented in the Incubator. If this is true, the move to the Incubator would be a serious degradation, as it would defy our main objective. For Interslavic, availability of all wiki content in both scripts is of crucial importance.

Thirdly, moving everything twice is a lot of extra work, especially if it comes with a serious loss in functionality. User:Oostwesthoesbes suggested skipping the whole Incubator stage, which apparently has already been done once in the case of Lingua Franca Nova (lfn.wikipedia.org). Would LangCom be willing to consider this solution for Interslavic, too?

Or, more ideally, would LangCom perhaps consider including Interslavic in the experiment that is currently under discussion? For us, the advantages would be tremendous:
* It will save us the trouble of moving everything twice, including adding and removing prefixes.
* The transliteration facilities that are vital for Interslavic would be preserved.
* A domain isv.wikipedia.org will give us a lot more visability–for example, via interwiki links–and generate a lot more activity than the Incubator. Although the Incubator is a great idea in itself, it is not the place where people look for information. Especially since Interslavic is not meant to serve the needs and interests of Interslavic speakers, but to provide understandable information to anyone who knows one of more Slavic languages.
* The criteria for activity are easily met if activity on both wikis is combined.
* All core messages have already been translated, and the same goes for many other parts of the interface, ca. 9200 messages in total. See https://codelookup.toolforge.org/isv-latn and https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Portal:Isv.
* Eligibility has not been verified yet, but I assume this should be nothing but a mere formality.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Jan van Steenbergen, a.k.a. IJzeren Jan

Op do 22 aug 2024 om 15:52 schreef Srishti Sethi <ssethi@wikimedia.org>:

Hello Language Committee,

I am writing today to share a proposal for an experiment addressing a new approach to onboarding a language wiki.

Since December 2023, we have had conversations with 35 relevant stakeholders, including three members from the Language Committee (Tochi, Mf-Warburg, and Jon), to develop recommendations addressing a few current challenges with the incubation journey. As a result of these discussions, several recommendations emerged, which are documented here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future_of_Language_Incubation/Recommendations which can be broadly grouped into the following two key areas:

1. Streamlining technical infrastructure  

2. Exploring social pathways

For the 2024-25 annual planned work of the Wikimedia Foundation and as part of the Content Growth objective (WE2/Knowledge Equity), the Language and Product Localization team with guidance from the Language Committee members, identified a recommendation that addresses some of the difficulties of content creation in the Incubator due to technical limitations of the platform. To address this, we would like to try the following: 

Identify a set of requests (maximum 5) from the list in the new wiki approval backlog which have been either already approved by the Language Committee and, prioritize their creation on the production infrastructure so that they do not have to continue writing content on the incubator wiki. At the end of a stipulated period we evaluate progress of these prioritized wikis compared to other test projects (approved or otherwise) still in the incubator. 

Please see the detailed proposal, including selection and inclusion criteria, timeline, implementation plan, and more information.  We also presented this proposal at Wikimania 2024: https://youtu.be/BbGrkYK8FEk?t=20299

After consultations with several other teams inside the WMF relevant to this area of work we believe this is a feasible starting point towards better content creation experiences for newer communities. To move onwards we would like to reach a shared agreement with the Language Committee and start off the pilot. Based on the criteria listed in the email, we would like to include as part of the experiment following list of wikis (also see attached screenshot): 

• Mapudungun

• Southern Ndebele

• Obolo

• Tai Nüa

• Pannonian Rusyn

We would like to kick off this experiment as early as possible and would really appreciate hearing your suggestions on changes or additions to the selection criteria and initial list of wikis by August 24th.

Cheers,

Srishti

Srishti Sethi Senior Developer Advocate Wikimedia Foundation

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