This assumes first that there is an objective NPOV (or NPOV range) that one could enforce. Now, I'm no moral relativist; I do not think that all cultures' positions on all topics are always objectively morally or ethically equivalent. But there are plenty of topics where reasonable people handle neutrality in very different ways. Here are a couple of examples that I can name that I don't necessarily think are the hottest topics around right now.

Lashing/caning for vandalism in Singapore. Americans think that was an outrageous punishment for an offense that at most would result in a fine in the US. People in East Asia are at least somewhat more prepared to say that this was an appropriate punishment for someone who is putting his interests ahead of society's.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Ukrainians consider him a hero of first rank, and Russians also see him positively. Poles see him negatively. And Jews see him as having been largely responsible for the worst pogrom against Jews in history before the Holocaust.

The largest Wikipedias (like English Wikipedia) handle both sides of such disagreements. They can do so because they have a large number of contributors representing a wide range of backgrounds who keep each other in check to some extent. Even at that, these projects have plenty of topics that engender ongoing edit wars.
Smaller projects may not handle things in a manner that we would consider so even-handed. A quick Google translate of the plwiki and ukwiki articles on Khmelnytsky at least superficially shows far less even-handedness than the enwiki article, though I did not then click through hyperlinks to see how all related topics were handled.
The above are situations well-known enough that people like us know about them. Who knows about all the smaller cases where there are differences like this that we don't know about, and that we are no position to judge in terms of neutrality? And unless we have someone trustworthy (and fluent in appropriate languages) monitoring every wiki for such things, I don't see how we could possibly enforce NPOV like that.
We cannot really even enforce some sort of neutrality on the Armenian massacre situation in Turkish, Armenian and Azeri languages. Enough said on that.

We supposedly use ISO 639–3 exactly to avoid politicizing the process. It's sometimes fair to decide we will take either the macrolanguage or the constituent languages, but not both. But using the macrolanguage only works if the constituent languages are mutually intelligible and if the communities get along well enough to cooperate. The very fact that our default position for new projects is to favor projects in constituent languages says to me that we recognize that most of the time there is a reason that different constituent languages are considered different.

I'm sorry, everyone. It is not possible "not [to] consider political differences", because there are facts on the ground. Not considering political differences is also a political choice. We are far better off sticking with ISO 639–3 unless there is a very, very good reason not to do so in a particular case.

Steven

Sent from Outlook

From: Langcom <langcom-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2019 12:21 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee <langcom@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Wikipedia in Saraiki

Hoi,

The problem is how to deal with the NPOV..

Thanks,

GerardM

On Mon, 28 Oct 2019 at 16:08, Steven White <koala19890@hotmail.com> wrote:

Well, as I have said many times, the current rule as written is problematic, and we have no business rejecting Montenegrin at this point.

Please understand, again, that I don't object to the rule in principle. If we were starting today with a situation where there were no Serbo-Croatian projects existing (or no Punjabi projects existing), we might well try to say, "You know what? There's only going to be one, and you're all going to have to get along, and this needs to be irrespective of political perspective."

But at this point, it doesn't work in either situation, for several reasons:

There are long-existing communities already. They each already have a culture, rules, and perspectives.
Based on a different, very firm WMF policy, "central authority" is almost never allowed to intervene on individual projects to "force" them to be more accommodating to the political and/or cultural minorities that could choose to participate.
The policy, as written, says "The committee does not consider political differences, since the Wikimedia Foundation's goal is to give every single person free, unbiased access to the sum of all human knowledge, rather than information from the viewpoint of individual political communities." You have to read the whole sentence there, not just the first phrase. By "not consider[ing]" political differences, the committee in fact perpetuates the fact that existing projects may already have "the viewpoint of individual political communities". In these cases, people in minority communities are tremendously disadvantaged in that they have to overcome (possibly) hostile political/cultural viewpoints—and may well not be able to do so.

It seems to me that there is only one way to operate this rule exactly as it is already written: "Central authority" must have the power to intervene on certain projects, and to establish and enforce rules that guarantee the neutrality that every project is supposed to have anyway. If that's not going to happen—and I'm pretty sure it's not, for a whole lot of reasons—then we need to allow new projects where (a) there is a language code, and (b) there are going to be significant political and cultural barriers in integrating minority communities into existing projects.

Steven

Sent from Outlook

From: Langcom <langcom-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of MF-Warburg <mfwarburg@googlemail.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2019 11:05 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee <langcom@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Wikipedia in Saraiki

Thanks for the info. So, what can we do?
If we boldly reject requests for new Serbo-Croatian language/dialect Wikipedias and say the existing ones wouldn't be allowed today, isn't this case the same?

Satdeep Gill <satdeepgill@gmail.com> schrieb am Mo., 21. Okt. 2019, 16:12:

It's not clear at all. Depends upon who you ask. It's a typical language-dialect problem.

I do know that, the Saraiki community in Pakistan has also been demanding a separate Saraikistan. So, for the community it's pretty much a separate language.

If you are asking my opinion then even Punjabi and Western Punjabi Wikipedias should have been one Wikipedia with two scripts (maybe a third script as well). Even Hindi-Urdu for that matter. It's always the socio-political reasons.

As per Wikipedia:

Saraiki was considered a dialect of Punjabi by most British colonial administrators,^[29] and is still seen as such by many Punjabis.^[30] Saraikis, however, consider it a language in its own right^[31] and see the use of the term "dialect" as stigmatising.^[32] A language movement was started in the 1960s to standardise a script and promote the language.^[20]^[33]

Best

Satdeep

On Mon, 21 Oct, 2019, 9:20 AM MF-Warburg, <mfwarburg@googlemail.com> wrote:

> While there may be a close similarity to Western Punjabi, I agree with Steven's point that the right time to bring that issue up would have been when we decided whether to mark the language as eligible. We did mark it as eligible (by Satdeep just over 2 years ago), and that has to mean something. To walk back on that now, after volunteers have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours working on it, is just not ok.

I disagree with this notion.

One of the tasks of the Language Committee is precisely to prevent new "Serbo-Croation" cases from happening. It has been suggested that this might be such a case here. So let us please discuss this issue and clear it up. I have done some reading and it seems to me that there might be enough differences between Saraiki and Western Punjabi anyway. But Satdeep brought up that that might not be the case, and on the request page there are also people who says that it's not a separate language (while others, of course, say the opposite).

I just would like this to be clarified in order not to have a situation in several years where everyone acknowledges that it is most unfortunate that there are several wikis...

(It is also a matter of fact that languages get marked as eligible all the time without a discussion, just because the majority of cases don't turn out to be problematic at all. I looked at the archives and saw that back then, Satdeep said on this list "There is some controversy regarding this but according to my analysis, it should be eligible." - That does not directly contradict his statement "Western Punjabi and Saraiki are pretty similar and my personal view is that this should be accommodated on one Wikipedia but the sociology-political situation in Pakistan calls for a separate Wikipedia for Saraiki." from 8 October, but I still would love to have the whole thing clarified as requested on 16 Oct.

Back in 2017, Oliver Stegen said in reply to the mentioned mail: "Any controversies may come to ight and be discussed accordingly during the verification phase which has started now." and I agree with this; a random marking as eligible should not prevent a discussion about what the situation really is.)

[Mails from 29 + 30 August 2017]

Am So., 20. Okt. 2019 um 05:30 Uhr schrieb Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com>:

I finally heard back from the first person [1] I emailed now, and he basically echoed what Satdeep said: All pages he checked, except the one I mentioned in the first email, are in Saraiki.

While there may be a close similarity to Western Punjabi, I agree with Steven's point that the right time to bring that issue up would have been when we decided whether to mark the language as eligible. We did mark it as eligible (by Satdeep just over 2 years ago), and that has to mean something. To walk back on that now, after volunteers have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours working on it, is just not ok.

Therefore I would like to officially propose that we approve the Saraiki Wikipedia, as they meet all of our criteria.

[1] I'll be happy to disclose his name and details on the private list if anyone on the committee wants me to, but I don't want to do so here on the public list since I never brought that up with him.

ons. 16. okt. 2019 kl. 18:04 skrev Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com>:

I have not gotten a reply yet. Yesterday I emailed to more people from Pakistani universities with Saraiki departments, but no reply from any if them yet either.

ons. 16. okt. 2019, 16:29 skrev Steven White <koala19890@hotmail.com>:

Have we heard from the expert yet?

On a related subject: Do we have any Wiktionary experts here? Saraiki Wiktionary is also now approvable in theory (assuming that the language issue on the Wikipedia clears). My concern about the Saraiki Wiktionary is only that compared to a lot of Wiktionary projects, this one appears pretty basic to me: just a straight Saraiki dictionary, with little in the way of bells and whistles (pronunciation, translations to other languages, etc.). But that's just based on the gross appearance of pages, as I do not read Saraiki (or any other language written in Perso-Arabic script). So Satdeep and anyone else: Does the content look ok? Are there greater expectations of what a Wiktionary should contain—expectations we have not communicated, I will add—or is this project appropriate and acceptable?

Steven

Sent from Outlook

From: Langcom <langcom-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2019 3:38 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee <langcom@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Wikipedia in Saraiki

I am still waiting to hear back from the expert. If he says the rest of the pages look fine, then I think we can move forward – Steven makes some good points as usual.

tor. 10. okt. 2019 kl. 21:03 skrev Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>:

Hoi,
The final stage is that we verify if the language it is said to be. When we find it is not or are not certain we have all the room to seek another authority to move forward. At this stage it becomes confusing and I am not convinced at all that we should.

Thanks,

GerardM

On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 19:21, Steven White <koala19890@hotmail.com> wrote:

This is effectively the same problem as we saw in the discussion of Montenegrin Wikipedia—although since all but two of us are from Europe, North America or Israel, we feel more confident making calls in a case like Montenegrin than we do here. (And, candidly, there is less chance in the Montenegrin case of being accused of racism/Euro-centrism, even if that accusation would be totally without merit in this case.)

But as I said back then, the rule as currently written is fine when the language area starts with a clean slate. If there were no Western Punjabi Wikipedia now, we could reasonably try to get a single project to try to accommodate both Western Punjabi and Saraiki. (Whether that effort would be successful is a different question, but we could try.) However, I take Satdeep's comment below to indicate that there would be serious problems trying to integrate a new Saraiki-language community into a ten-year old Western Punjabi-language community, and that he recommends against it, based on the current "facts on the ground". Besides, to some extent the time to say "no" has passed, since Satdeep marked the project as "eligible" in 2017. So I think we need to move forward with this.

Steven

Sent from Outlook

From: Langcom <langcom-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 9, 2019 4:44 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee <langcom@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Wikipedia in Saraiki

...

As for the Western Punjabi/Saraiki issue, I don't know enough about that to have any opinion either way.

tir. 8. okt. 2019 kl. 19:00 skrev Satdeep Gill <satdeepgill@gmail.com>:

...

P.S. Western Punjabi and Saraiki are pretty similar and my personal view is that this should be accommodated on one Wikipedia but the sociology-political situation in Pakistan calls for a separate Wikipedia for Saraiki.

Regards

Satdeep Gill

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