Wikibooks Meitei and
Wikinews Meitei (mni). We've just marked the Wikipedia and Wiktionary requests as eligible. The same person proposed these two requests, but has created no content yet. I'm placing them on hold, but actually encouraging the contributor to focus on the first
two projects first and not totally scattering the effort.
Wikinews Hausa (ha). First language of over 40 million in West Africa. 2,000-page
Wikipedia and 200-page Wiktionary exist. No content created here yet; putting on hold.
Wikisource Literary Chinese (lzh). This is the tricky request
of this set. I can use some guidance. But frankly, at least in the short term, I'm inclined to mark eligible. Let me explain.
- At first glance, I couldn't understand why this content would not be better served within Chinese Wikisource. And I asked the proposer that question
here.
- The answer had some complexity, and there is (in fact) a certain amount of duplication of content at the moment between the lzh test in Old Wikisource and Chinese Wikisource.
- Ultimately, the answer came down to something like this:
Literary Chinese is not (simply) an early form of Chinese, but rather was a literary lingua franca for people in many lands of that part of the world. If one were to use French as an analogy, Literary Chinese is more comparable to Latin than to Old French.
And I would add that Literary Chinese (lzh) has a different langcode from Old Chinese (cch) or Middle Chinese (ltc).
- To continue the analogy a bit, the proposer suggests that if all the content in Literary Chinese had to be included in Chinese Wikisource, it would be equivalent to putting all Latin content
in French Wikisource—where the language of the interface, discussions, templates, and what have you is French, not Latin, and therefore not fully accessible to speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. Similarly, here, putting the content in Chinese Wikisource
would make the contents less accessible to people whose vernacular is Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc., but whose literary history is tied to Literary Chinese.
Given that there is more inherent flexibility to allow projects in historical languages for Wikisources than for other projects, and given the above arguments, I think we should mark this request as eligible. But I'm going to wait seven days on this for comments
from the Committee.
Steven