OK. Here is, first, my initial email. I will resend relevant communication afterwards:
== Voting ==
This is also proposal, so read it and comment if you don't agree or you want any addition.
1) No voting
1.1) According to the Closing projects policy [1], particular member of the committee analyzes discussion and, if decides that the project should be closed, sends the request to WMF Board.
1.2) Clear-cut situations for making a language eligible for Wikimedia projects: the language has a valid ISO 639-3 code, there are no significant issues in relation to the language itself, the population of speakers is significant, request made by a native speaker. In this case, any committee member can mark language / project eligible.
1.3) Approval without obvious formal requirements. No project will be approved without them.
2) Simple majority (of those who expressed opinion)
2.1) Eligibility of a language with a valid ISO 639-3 code, but without significant population of native speakers. (Note: this covers ancient, constructed, reviving and languages with small number of speakers.)
2.2) Eligibility of a language without a valid ISO 639-3 code, but valid BCP 47 code. (Note: this covers Ecuadorian Quechua.)
2.3) Eligibility of a language with significant collision between prescriptive and descriptive information. (Note: this covers "macrolangauges".)
2.4) Project approval if not 1.3.
3) 2/3 majority (of those who expressed opinion)
3.1) Any change of the rules, including the committee's role in possible changes of the Language proposal policy [2] and Closing projects policy [1].
4) Consensus (of those who expressed opinion)
4.1) A new member of the Language committee should not be opposed by any of the current committee member.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closing_projects_policy [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:48 PM, Oliver Stegen oliver_stegen@sil.org wrote:
The first email that I can see only contains sections 1.2, 1.3 and 2.2, i.e. it looks like substantial parts of the proposal are missing. Please upload the entire proposal somewhere and send the link. Thanks.
On 17-May-17 22:43, Milos Rancic wrote:
Oliver, are you able to see the first email in the thread?
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:40 PM, Oliver Stegen oliver_stegen@sil.org wrote:
Imho, it would be helpful to have a link to the amended proposal, rather than having to wade through previous discussion. Possible to upload and send such a link? (Or maybe that has already happened and I just can't find the link? In which case sorry for not finding it - please still send it to this list.)
On 17-May-17 20:33, Milos Rancic wrote:
We should start finishing this issue. May all of you check the previous discussion and say if you agree in general with the proposal amended by MF-Warburg? If so, I would make the next draft.
On Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 12:52 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 6:19 PM, MF-Warburg mfwarburg@googlemail.com wrote:
> > 1.2) Clear-cut situations for making a language eligible for > Wikimedia > projects: the language has a valid ISO 639-3 code, there are no > significant issues in relation to the language itself, the population > of speakers is significant, request made by a native speaker. In this > case, any committee member can mark language / project eligible.
This is already what we are doing. But if such a case should turn out to be contentious, we would discuss it even after someone marked it as eligible without discussion. At least that would have been my expectation. So if we want to make such a detailed policy, could we please add that as well?
Agreed.
> 1.3) Approval without obvious formal requirements. No project will be > approved without them.
What does this mean exactly?
Yes, it could be described more in detail. I thought that we can't vote about approving a new Wikipedia if they didn't translate 500 MediaWiki messages and similar. I was too lazy to take a look into the exact conditions for approval. In other words, we could discuss about the activity, but we can't discuss to approve the project if it's not written in particular language. And similar.
Ok, this is our current issue with Lingua Franca Nova and Ancient Greek. Shouldn't we better discuss about the underlying policy regarding constructed and ancient languages? A general rule seems better than the possibility to allow everything by a majority vote.
Yes. But it would anyway require majority vote. What's the difference between Ancient Greek and Sumerian? Would we allow Wikipedia in Sumerian? Classical Hebrew? ...
> 2.2) Eligibility of a language without a valid ISO 639-3 code, but > valid BCP 47 code. (Note: this covers Ecuadorian Quechua.)
I don't recall that we ever discussed allowing projects with BCP47 codes. Again, isn't this something that should be discussed as a policy?
In general, we should discuss and (hopefully) approve usage BCP 47 formally, as well. However, it is so wide territory, that it's hard to make a consistent rule about it: Why should we approve qu-ec and why we shouldn't approve en-au? Why it's better to use mn-mong for Mongolian instead of mvf? ...
The combination of 3.1 and 4.1 would be bad insofar as it allows a 2/3 majority to introduce a new member anyway.
Yes. But that would mean that there is something really bad going on here.
Yes, Langcom works with the principle that a proposal is approved unless a member is against it, in which case the proposal dies (it is not exactly rejected, n'est-ce pas?). At times I have been quite annoyed by it as well. I think however that in general it works quite well. Over the course of the years in which I have been a langcom member now, I sometimes thought about whether the “governance“ could be improved. But my personal conclusion always was: not really. It wouldn't harm to formalize a rule for getting rid of a theoretical trollish member opposing everything without a reason. But apart from that? I'm not really sure that introducing majority voting will help much.
Time and efforts required for arguing with only one person and having in mind that it's useless makes LangCom dysfunctional. Besides that, in few years we could have even 100 requests for eligibility per year. It's likely that 60-70 would be valid, but it's also likely that we would have to spend extraordinary time on discussion about 10-20 of them. Even if it's once per month, it would be stressful enough and lead us into the new period of hibernation.
Besides that, it's not about random persons here, but about people with enough professional and personal integrity. It is normal that we don't agree about everything and that we should accept if more members of LangCom decided to approve the project.
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