New subject: Closure of Malagasy Wikibooks

10 Apr 2018

Look, I'm not trying to make trouble, nor to ramrod my opinions. With thanks to
members who supported my approach, I am going to revert the closure of the discussion.

Before I do that, I will just point out that I think I have followed the rules up to this
point. Gerard's willingness to agree to the closure happened in March, while we were
still in a discussion phase. He did not comment afterwards, so I wouldn't have
characterized what he did as negating my proposal. I do think it is within my purview as
clerk to put a proposal on the table.  If I stretched a point of the rules at all, it was
to hypothesize that a "discussion" during which only one member comments is not
sufficient to establish a committee consensus to close an existing project, particularly
when its only real problem is inactivity. But maybe that's not correct; that needs to
be discussed.

I would also point out to Marco that per policy, the community's role in such matters
is advisory, not binding. Whether or not it should apply to this particular case, the
Board and LangCom have expressed a general point of view that they would rather keep
projects open than to close them, provided that the project is not full of vandalism. So
while the community does seem to support the closure, LangCom need not follow the
community's advice, although it certainly may do so.

Closing projects policy<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closing_projects_policy>
normally does not involve an actual vote; it is supposed to close on consensus. Again, my
perspective is that a consensus discussion to close a project that is not vandalized
requires more than one voice. If members disagree, then please say so. (And I'd point
out that frequently we allow a single voice to mark a project request as
"eligible" or "rejected"; I just think existing projects deserve a
little stronger benefit of the doubt.) So let's let this run for at least another
week, to April 17, and see what else people have to say about it.

Steven

Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>

Re: [Langcom] Closure of Malagasy Wikibooks