Dear Gerard
Thank you, this kind of feedback is very help. You say:
The point of the policy is to explicitly invalidate any and all arguments that were used before. There is no point in looking in older history, at best it shows the genesis of the policy.
What I take from this is that
(1) The decision was made as an internal matter by LangCom without consultation
(2) It is primarily designed to shut down arguments about Ancient Languages
I fully sympathise with why you did this, re (2). You received may requests for AL projects that made no sense, some got through the gate no doubt and you needed to make this stop.
However the policy has left a lot of unresolved problems, at least for the Latin project, and most likely for Sanskrit and Ancient Chinese, all of whom are disqualified from further progress. There is a question as to how this plays out for potential funding or project building, and how LangCom ensures the existing projects meet their mission (in my view it seems to leave this problem aide, despite the remit of the committee). Finally there is a question as to whether Ancient Greek in particular deserves a shot at a project.
My point is simply that issues like this require a consultation process, to test for such problems, and mitigate against them.
The current proposal attempt to mitigate such problems by creating a very slightly looser ruleset. As such it is not a consultation on the mitigations and effects of the current policy.
So tthe Committee must not simply assume that is if does not like the current RFC it can simply leave the current policy in place. The current policy still lacks consultatation and carries all the rough edges you would expect.
Thank you again for responding
Jim
Hoi,
The point of the policy is to explicitly invalidate any and all arguments that were used before. There is no point in looking in older history, at best it shows the genesis of the policy.
Thanks,
GerardM
(NB that this mail was sent in on Friday, I have approved it only now as a list admin, because I haven't been able to until now.)
Thank you for approving it and taking the time to respond.
Am So., 12. Sept. 2021 um 21:46 Uhr schrieb Jim Killock <
jim@killock.org.uk>:
> While there may have been no requirements at the time to provide a rationale, people who feel the policy is not set in exactly the right place are left with no formal explanation as to why the Language Committee devised the rules as it did.
>At least, nobody has responded to my requests for documentation from 2007 showing how the decision was made. If it is or can be made available, that would be great. I have listed what I know at
I really don't understand this. 2007 is prior to my time in Langcom and I have no knowledge I could share about the decisions made back then. However, I also don't see how this would help now. Some members have previously commented in the "start allowing ancient languages" RFC with good reasons as to why such projects shouldn't be approved. If there are "secret reasons from 2007", they can only further support not allowing ancient languages, probably.
>This is a problem in itself, but I think is also a large factor in the upset felt by people who find their projects are declined. There is a policy, but it is not explained. the justifications are communicated to them adhoc and it is extremely hard for people understand why Wikimedia has this policy, as it is in fact, unexplained in any formal document. Instead, people whose projects are turned down are asked to accept the adhoc explanations of Wikimedia volunteers. This is bound to cause friction and grievance.
>If anything can be published from the time, that would of course be very helpful.
That is exacly what I mean by “reverse engineering”. If you don’t have the reasoning available, and can’t show the consultation process that helped arrive at this, then any reasoning now is purely gueswork, or the preferred but unconsulted view of the Committee.
In essence, it remains an untransparent process and open to accusations of being arbitrary.
I don’t think that is a sound way forward.
[...]
>The way forward
>Publish if available, but do not engineering the 2007 decision: I do not think the committee should now reverse engineer the reasons for the 2007 decision, if it turns out to be unavailable, especially as it probably was made without much public consultation or evidence gathering.
>If the documentation does turn up, it is still twenty years old and there is still a need to take a look at the performance of the current ALWs and think about how they should be best supported.
As above.
>Pause before looking again at the recommendations made on the current RFC. Rather I think there should be a period of evidence gathering and reflection about ALWs. Once this evidence is gathered, some observations and recommendations can flow back to the RFC process.
Can I also ask you to take a pause? I, too, mean this in good faith. But every time I try to follow what is happening at the RFC, new walls of texts have appeared and the RFC now has 5 appendices - it's like every day a new one pops up, and they all were created by you. Indeed I like to assess things thoroughly and carefully, which I feel like I cannot do if the proposals are piling up at such speed.
Yes, absolutely. I am at the end of my own intellectual journey on this. I do appreciate I have created a lot of material anjd I would appreciate feedback.
The next step IMO is the evidence gathering to see what kind of policy is justifed
But also, I believe there is a way forward which would start to deal with the actual substantive problems - that is starting a programme of support for the Ancient Language Wikis or ALWs, once we know what state they are in and what they do well.
this would require shifting the current policy in order to tackle a lot of problematic practice without it looking like an attempt to push those wikis away.
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