Wikibooks Meiteihttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikibooks_Meitei and Wikinews Meiteihttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/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 Hausahttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/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 Chinesehttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/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 herehttps://wikisource.org/wiki/Category_talk:Literary_Chinese. * 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
Sent from Outlookhttp://aka.ms/weboutlook
For Literary Chinese Wikisource proposal, it should be noted that out of almost three hundred thousand documents currently hosted on Chinese wikisource, most of them are actually lzh documents (like I tried to click "random document" button there for ten consecutive times and all ten times the outcome page is something in lzh). So it would either be a.) a pretty huge task to split and migrate all documents, or b.) selectively only put documents that are not from Chinese speaking region into lzh ws for convenient, or c.) allow the long term coexistence of lzh document on both ws in the long run and just let editors decide how to do it.
And then another point of concern is that, for all the mentioned East Asian wiki community, Vietnamese and Korean wikisource are pretty dead and amount of speakers in both language that can understand lzh ancient document from the traditional geographical area where those languages were spoken are pretty low, Japanese ws seems better in both aspects but still seems less active than Chinese community, so there's also concern that 1.) would it be able to attract enough editors to maintain all hundred thousands documents that will be put into it, and 2.) Given the proportion of editors from different ws, it seems likely that if a lzh ws is to be created then most of its editors will be from Chinese ws which wouldn't really match the.prospect of having a standalone lzh ws.
Also it doesn't seems like there's anyone from WS Japanese expressed opinion about the matter yet? There were some past discussion on Japanese ws that mentioned ideally there should have a separate lzh ws but it seems like those discussion lead to nowhere with some pointing out that previous request for lzh ws have been rejected.