This is my argument (or rather, my
quickly hashed out rambling) as to why the community draft for the
language proposal policy should become our official policy, in place
of the current one. My argument is fairly long, but I hope that it
does not descend into irrelevance and that people will read it
through to the end.
The community draft language proposal
policy has the advantage of being, in the Wikimedia spirit, a more
collaborative work. The current language proposal policy was made by
a small group, but the community draft was, as its name suggests,
open to ideas from anyone who had any, and I think that it is a
better reflection of the feeling of Wikimedia users than the current
one.
I want to be very clear that I believe
the language proposal system we have now is far better than the one
we had before: it is fairer, quicker and more efficient. However,
although it is better than the last one, it is not as good as it
could be.
Some Wikimedia users (and I am
certainly part of this group) thought it unfair that, whilst
artificial languages such as Esperanto and Volupak were allowed by
this policy to have Wikipedias, classical languages such as Latin and
Ancient Greek were not, on the grounds that, since they have no
native speakers, they do not serve a community and are therefore at
odds with the foundation's mission statement. This seems like both a
contradiction and a questionable interpretation of the foundation's
mission statement. With this in mind, one of the requisites for
eligibility in the current policy:
“The proposal has a sufficient
number of living native speakers to form a viable community and
audience. (Wikisource wikis are allowed in languages with no native
speakers, although these should be on a wiki for the modern form of
the language if possible.)
If the proposal is for an
artificial language such as Esperanto,
it must have a reasonable degree of recognition as determined by
discussion (this requirement is being discussed by the language
subcommittee).”
Has been changed to this in the community draft:
“The proposal has a sufficient worldwide number of people able to
express themselves at a fluent level, in the written, spoken or
signed form, to form a viable community and audience.
If the proposal is for a
language without native speakers, it will need to be demonstrated
that it is well attested in written texts, and is in current use as
a special, auxiliary, engineered, classical or learned language.”
The community draft's requisite
reflects the fact that a viable community and audience does not need
native speakers, not everyone wishes to use a Wikipedia in his or
her native language, and that knowledge gained in one's second,
third or nth language
is just as good as knowledge gained in one's first language. Latin,
for example, was the Lingua Franca of Western Europe for much of the
second millennium, even though it had no native speakers (or, at
most, a negligible number); had Wikimedia, with its current language
proposal policy, existed at that time, it would not have been
eligible for a Wikipedia, despite being the language in which a
Wikipedia would be most useful. Today, the English language has a
similar role; who would bat an eyelid at an internet community that
used English despite having no native speakers of the language? If
there were no native English speakers today the English language
Wikipedia would still be a very useful project, but would be deemed
by the current policy to not have a “viable community and
audience”. I admit that these arguments may seem a little
far-fetched, but I hope they show that there is a problem with the
policy as it stands. I believe that by allowing people to share and
receive knowledge in classical languages as well as modern ones we
would better fulfil the Wikimedia Foundation's mission statement:
“The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and
engage people around the world to collect and develop educational
content under a free
license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it
effectively and globally.”
The community draft also specifies
how much of the interface has to be translated before final approval
for both first projects in a language and projects in languages that
already have projects. By requiring the 500 most-used messages to be
translated for a first project, the policy sets a goal that is tough
but reasonable. Requiring too many messages to be translated before
the creation of the project would be likely to tire-out a smaller
community (which would, of course, grow once the project was
actually created). Not requiring any would make it easier for
languages without much real support to slip through the net (I think
that this part of the process should be used not only to make sure
that the language has an interface, but also as another part of the
test to see whether a language is suitable for the project). By
requiring 500 messages to be translated we can ensure that people
are serious about the project and have enough motivation, that the
language (if it is classical) is capable of expressing modern
concepts and that potential editors are not *too*
over-worked during what is (let's be honest) the most boring part of
the process. It is more sensible to require a grater number of
messages to be translated before the creation of another project in
a language because a language that already has at least one
Wikimedia project should have a bigger community.
Contrary to what one might infer from the length of my argument, the
community draft actually proposes very few changes from the current
policy; in fact, it is probably better thought of as a fine-tuning
of the current policy rather than a completely new one, and I hope
that other will agree with me that the few changes that the
community proposes to make to the policy will make it better.