Dear colleagues:
As the end of the conventional calendar year approaches, and many of you may be going away
for a bit to enjoy time with family and friends, I want to summarize what happened in
2017, as well as the tasks and issues I think are already pending and waiting for us at
the beginning of 2018:
2017:
* Ten projects approved and created, the most in a single year since 2014.
* Another two projects simply await completion of the formal, seven-day comment period
at Meta before final approval. I expect both to have phabricator tasks open by year-end
for their creation.
* Two other projects are tentatively approved, pending language verification.
Specific issues currently open:
* Decision on the Nungar (Wikipedia) project
* Opening of a moderated discussion on Meta in Spanish about the language issues at
Nahuatl Wikipedia (action item: Maor)
* Language verification and final approvals of Ingush and Gorontalo Wikipedias
Policy issues currently open:
* Creation of parallel projects in second scripts where a project already exists: See
my email of 5 Dec, 15:39
UTC<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/langcom/2017-December/001710.h…
* Clarification on policy as to what conlangs (and, for that matter historical
languages) should be eligible: This is partly an outgrowth of the LFN approval, and partly
an outgrowth of the longstanding requests by communities like the "Ancient
Greek" community, especially given that LangCom has marked "Coptic" as
approved.
New specific issues to be opened at the beginning of 2018:
* Eligibility of Montenegrin Wikipedia. Some media reports out of Montenegro—and some
correspondence between certain Wikimedians and SIL—suggest that a langcode for Montenegrin
(cnr) will be published by SIL in the January 2018 approval release. Montenegrins are
already screaming for their project. Although Montenegrin—and for that matter, Serbian,
Croatian and Bosnian—are all mutually intelligible, I assume that if this code is, in
fact, approved, then this project will be eligible. I'd like to get an early
confirmation of that so that if and when the code is published, I can act promptly.
* Proposal to close Cebuano
Wikipedia<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects…ia>.
There is a proposal to remove all the bot-created content and port the rest of the project
to Incubator. Given that cebwiki has over five million pages, that's absurd on its
face. But some of the bot content is of poor quality. So I'm not sure what should
happen with this proposal, or what we can/should do about it.
* Merger of Beta Wikiversity into Incubator. The most recent version of this remains
open. I think we should decide one way or the other if this is happening or not and be
done with it.
* I will continue to introduce RFL requests that have been open for a long time.
Happy new year to all!
Steven
Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>