I think there is a downside in that a local national "dialect" wikipedia in a
country as important as Egypt takes energy away from the main Arabic wikipedia, which has
global range and an important role to play worldwide. Wikipedias, after all, are written
rather than spoken entities.
--- On Sun, 10/5/08, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
From: Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] On Arabic and sub-language proposals.
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Sunday, October 5, 2008, 11:01 AM
Is there any
downside at all for an individual who asks for a new language of
Wikipedia to be started, after that version fails? We don't
really have a list of people who started failed projects. If I
don't propose a Lebanese Wikipedia, my neighbor might do so. If
it fails, the Wikimedia Foundation will be more ridiculed over its
inflated number of 250 languages, but my neighbor doesn't suffer.