How about this:
Over the past several years, new projects have been approved and created improving our coverage of world languages. However, the vast majority of this growth since the formation of Langcom has been in European languages - a quick sampling reveals new Wikipedias in Rusyn (Eastern Europe), Gagauz (Moldova and Ukraine), North Frisian (Germany and Denmark) as well as Wikisource in Breton (France) and Venetian (Italy), Wikiversity in Swedish and Wikibooks in Limburgish (Netherlands, Belgium and Germany), although none of those are new languages for WM projects. At first, there was an encouraging trend - the first 4 Wikipedias created after the new language policy was in place were in Kabyle (North Africa), Hakka (China and Chinese diaspora), Bikol (Philippines) and normative Belarusian. However, this trend seems to have changed so that now, since December of 2009, 9 new Wikipedias have been created, but all but 1 were in European minority languages (the exception was Banjar, of Indonesia and Malaysia).
So my question for discussion is, what, if anything, can be done to encourage growth and improved linguistic coverage in other areas of the world?
2011/2/19 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, In Berlin, in parallel to the MediaWiki http://mediawiki.org/ hackathon, members of the language committeehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committeeof the Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/ will meet for a first time in real life.
As I read the roster of the people who may attend, I am amazed at their qualifications. All people are involved in their Wikipediashttp://wikipedia.org/in the Incubator http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, they are linguists, standard people, a script expert, Wikimedians.
The first line of our business will be to evaluate what we do. We will get to know each other better and we will talk endlessly about language, Wikipedia and what not.
You can help us be more focused by suggesting topics to our agenda. Anything goes and when we understand the issue raised, we will attempt to formulate an opinion. When such an opinion is actionable, we will raise it with the people that can make a difference.
The topics may be all over the map and they do not need to be confined to the language policyhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policyor even the Wikimedia Foundation. When there are issues in MediaWiki, we may pop over to the people at the Hackathon and ask their opinion. Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l