On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 08:34:18 +0100, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
Translating/creating policies seems to be a much better test of actual interest in doing work. Once you do that, that shows a commitment to the project.
Agreed. A project need to have some principal policies at its start - or would be better: after seeing the current situation of Japanese Wiktionary, I strongly recommend everyone to expect creating a new project.
Without principal policy some prudent editors hesitate to submit articles. Vandals don't care such things ... and specially continuous labor by active sysops sometimes a disastrous situation could arise - like Ja wiktionary.
Though I can't summarize the whole history of Ja wiktionary since its creating, one major reason of its administrative weakness is its fail to establish ground principals in its early days in my opinion: an active user insisted to licence articles not under GFDL but other conditions. I don't remember the details, but it was enough to hesitate contributors to submit if I recall correctly,. I admit it was a very extreme case, but I convince if we can provide a newly created project with basic policies, even if they are rough and need improvement, it is much better than lack of them.
Future projects don't necessarily match our current userbase. To tie the process for creating new language editions directly to that userbase seems needlessly restrictive. Building a small community on Meta and writing key pages before launching the project is also simply good planning
Preparing somewhere, on meta or existing Wikinews (at subpages of user page) seems good to me. If preferable, Wikinews proposed can have platform to prepare and draft their policies on meta (like TR). It would make them to give a look on other projects' policy and give a good occasion to consider their own in comparison with others: a diversity of projects give us a good chance to elaborate our policies. For suspicion a project would be created by newbies or trolls who understand not our policy, such platform on meta could give the transparency of their policy to interesting observers.