Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
I keep hearing about this committee and its rules, and I keep liking it less and less. Who was it behind originally appointing a small group tasked with the job of deciding if a language was worthy of a project? As long as people are willing to get it started, what does it hurt allowing it to go forward? If the project stagnates, then you close it.
Hosting a tiny wiki is negligible in terms of server resources, so it's not even like it's a waste of space. However, what /is/ a waste is the dozens and dozens of e-mails I get on the subject, trying to debate minute details of Ancient Greek to decide if it fits the policy to the letter.
If it's this hard to get a project off the ground, then the system is flawed.
The language subcommittee was set up by the special projects committee and approved by the Board of Trustees. It was set up because the previous system was much more flawed, entirely based on pure numeric voting tucked in neatly amongst the flame wars and sockpuppetry.
Some common results of that previous system were political repression by out-voting, attempts to falsify votes by creating many accounts per person, empty wikis that even today attract vandalism and spam and and bias, takeover of a small wiki by another language group or a group of friends, poor quality, and so forth.
Furthermore, the votes were completely arbitrary, decided entirely on the whims of whoever happened to vote. When a request got through this flawed process, it frequently did not even get created at all. Some requests approved by vote in the early days were still open during the transition to the policy in late 2007.
In the new system, it's actually not that difficult to have a wiki created: meet the specific requirements outlined on the policy page, and the wiki will be created. It requires some work, but the arbitrariness and inequality of the previous system is virtually nonexistent.
Of course, if a wiki *doesn't* meet the requirements, it won't be approved. This has nothing to do with the difficulty of the process, it's an absolute condition. What we are discussing is not the Greek Wikipedia or any other particular case, it is the policy. If you think it is a waste of time to consult the community about changing the policy, you're welcome to ignore these emails.
The system is flawed, of course; I have never seen any perfect system. But it is vastly better than the system it replaced, and we're discussing ways to improve it right now.