On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 2:07 PM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
I've proposed the "Can someone write an FA on the language's modern literature?" criterion as a useful surrogate for the types of criteria you suggest.
But just saying that a person "can" do something doesn't mean that the person "will" do it. Volunteers work on what they want to work on, and if nobody wants to write a particular article or class of article, it will never get written.
Through Wikipedia policy, if the article exists then the topic must be notable. However if the article doesn't exist, that doesnt mean that the topic is non-notable. What this is, is a test with potential false negatives.
What I'm saying is, we have to allow an outlet for people proposing a new language Wikipedia in a "historical" language to prove their case. Right now, the subcommittee tells them, "Don't bother me kid, go to the International Organization for Standardization", which is an impossible task, because the ISO is a big bureaucracy that just doesn't deal with categorizing "historical" languages that are still alive in a written form.
Writing an FA would not be easy, but it is a task that the proposers of a new language Wikipedia in a "historical" language could be reasonably expected to be able to accomplish to prove their case (or not). The time-scale for writing an FA would typically be a few months, which is quite comparable to the time-scale of the -vastly unproductive- back-and-forth arguments that characterize a typical request to the subcommittee of this type.
Thanks, Pharos