On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Marcus Buck me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
Please keep in mind, that the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to bring knowledge to the people. Knowledge which was previously not available to them (if it would have been available, Wikipedia and the other projects would have been pointless). Not available cause companies/publishers wanted to/had to make money with it and they couldn't afford it. Or not available cause they spoke the wrong language or their society not being wealthy enough, so that no publisher even tried to publish works providing this knowledge.
This seems to put the burden of proof onto the content consumers, instead of the content providers. That is, we shouldn't have a project for a particular language unless there are established groups of people available to consume content in that language. We can ignore the issue of Wikisource and Wikiquote, for now, since those projects aim to consolidate and preserve existing knowledge, and you can't really do that unless there is existing knowledge to preserve. For those two projects the burden of proof needs to lie with the content producers, not the content consumers.
This should be done for every language. Regardless of whether there already is scholarly work in the language. If _we_ aim at providing knowledge to them, why should we demand existing "knowledge providers" like universities or newspapers? "You want to aquire knowledge? Okay, please furnish proof that you have enough knowledge first!"
We shouldn't do EVERY language. It's not just about demanding preexisting content, but we also need to ensure that there is a viable community of project editors. A wiki cannot exist if there are no editors. We should also take into consideration, if only peripherally, the existence of readers and content consumers.
If there are editors but no readers, the project essentially becomes one of knowledge obfuscation, not knowledge sharing. If I take information that I have and I write it in language X for which there are no readers, that information is "hidden" from everybody but myself. It becomes little more then a complicated encryption system. The WMF is certainly not in the habit of encrypting and hiding information. To recap, there are several things that should be considered before creating a new language project:
1) Is there a viable community of editors? We can gauge this based on translations at Betawiki, and on activity at the incubator 2) Is there a community of potential readers? The community of readers should not exactly overlap the community of editors (or else we run into an encryption problem, like I outlined above). 3) Are there any other additional restrictions that we need to consider on a per-project basis? that is, does it make sense to have a wikinews, wikisource, or wikiversity in this particular language?
Of course, how we define words like "viable" and "community" is still up in the air.
--Andrew Whitworth