I'm glad you mentioned this one. There are any number of requests, and/or test projects in Incubator, hoping to create new projects in languages where projects already exist, but in a different script. As just a couple
of examples:
My best understanding here is that there are a bunch of tradeoffs going on in all of these cases:
- By default, I know we'd prefer for such things to be incorporated into existing projects when possible. But "when possible" is full of challenges:
- Best approach is to use script converters, of course.
- Sometimes script converters are not possible or practical. In such cases, you
can have multiple pages in different scripts within a single project. That's what we do in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Wikipedia; see, for example, our articles on
Astronomy.
- Sometimes, though, it seems communities are unwilling to allow this. The late, unlamented "Moldovan" projects are one example; in theory, the Romanian community could have allowed Cyrillic pages, but refused. But even assuming that's not a good example,
there are other cases where communities don't want to allow such a thing, and I don't know when those objections are practically motivated and when they are culturally/politically motivated. (I'm not sure about the Sindhi project, for example.)
- I also don't know at what point things become worthwhile trying. Wikipedia in
Pinyin-romanized Mandarin potentially makes sense to me (provided that it's not better to incorporate it into zhwiki). Wikipedia in Chinese-ideograph English (or Cyrillic English) makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Any guidance/discussion would be very useful.