On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Oliver Stegen oliver_stegen@sil.org wrote:
The proposal is to open a new language edition of an existing Wikimedia project that does not already exist (see the complete list of Wikimedia projects or the SiteMatrix).
That answer being that WikiData is listed among the "existing Wikimedia projects", i.e. when there is a request to open a language (or a language variant) in WikiData, LangCom makes a recommendation whether to allow that language, yes or no.
That's a good explanation! I was never treated that as the a language of an existing Wikimedia project, but as Wikidata content (one of its sets) and, based on that, I was opposing the idea that LangCom interferes with the work of Wikidata.
There are, however, a couple of issues which should be cleared:
1) Is the next statement true: If an information has been added into Wikidata, counting that the information has been written in a "natural" language (including constructed ones, in this case), does the information have to be defined as belonging to a particular language? (If the answer is "yes", it makes Wikidata languages set a matter which should be regulated by LangCom.)
2) If it's regulated by LangCom, at least the requests for eligibility should be transferred to our Meta page.
3) This is about the extensive usage of BCP 47. I suggest adding Wikidata projects into the section "simple majority needed" inside of [not yet effective] Voting policy [1].
4) Should LangCom or any other hypothetical body regulate other "defining sets" on Wikidata? What about ISO/IEC 80000 (physical quantities and unites of measurement) or ISO 3166-1 (country codes)?
5) MediaWiki should be treated in the same way as Wikidata. While Translatewiki is not a Wikimedia project, MediaWiki is.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Voting_policy