Hi Jesse and Gerard,
thanks for you valuable comments. Actually, I needed some time to think about the issue.
I appreciate your points and I can leave with the fact that there are no written policies, and that requirements are slightly different from project to project. I also see a great improvement in the recent months, for instance, a large group of incubator projects has been given the conditionally approved status etc.
Still, I also see that people are desperate to leave comments on all available discussion pages, claiming that though the projects they are promoting fulfilled all the requirements still no decision is coming after months. This may sound a technical problem but in fact for a smaller language opening a project is a big deal which gets media attention and helps a lot to attract new contributors. Even a technical delay of a couple of months for creation of an already approved wp may have some negative media coverage.
My understanding (please correct me if I am wrong on the point) is that this is happening since the manpower behind the decision is insufficient: the committee is not big enough, some of the members of the committee are not active, and in the end only several members have to do all the job. Whatever excellent these members are, this slows down things enormously.
This brings an obvious question: if the members are neither elected nor appointed by an authoritative body, why do not you just take more people who would be willing to do the job? I am not sure what the optimum size of the committee would be, but I think at the present stage just recruiting more members would really help speeding out things and at least sorting out the requests which are there for months without any changes.
Another thing is dealing with the existing projects. I would still find it more logical if the same body deals with the creation of new projects and audit of existing projects, even if the criteria might be different for the two things. I am not sure who has to decide, and it would definitely require more manpower, but such development would definitely make sense for me.
Cheers, Yaroslav
Hello Yaroslav,
Before I try to answer your questions, please keep in mind that the language subcommittee never makes any official public messages; any comments by subcommittee members, including myself, are personal comments that don't necessarily reflect subcommittee opinion as a whole. The 100-article limit noted by GerardM is a personal criteria and not an official requirement (as listed at < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy#Requisites
), though it of course comes up in constructive subcommittee
discussion about each project.
The official policy for the approval of new subdomains is public at < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy >. This policy is applied equally to all requests (barring rare exceptional cases). The subcommittee is specifically entrusted by the board with developing the policy to ensure that new projects flourish, and to avoid inactive or problematic projects as we have had in the past. So far we have had great success, but suggestions are always welcome.
I try my best to make subcommittee decisions as transparent as possible. I archive all subcommittee discussion to < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_subcommittees/Languages/Arch...
, although recent messages have not yet been archived because I was
away over December. The policy is also public, and you can track changes by simply watching the page history. In addition, the page at < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages > shows the status of every current and recently closed request, as well as the date the status last changed. Further, there are a set of statistics on test projects at < http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pathoschild/Status >, and I'll be finishing a public comprehensive analysis tool in the next few days to replace them. If you have any viable suggestions for more transparency, feel free to contact me any time.
Members of the language subcommittee are not openly elected. The original members were approved by the special projects committee, and additional members where appointed by subcommittee consensus from the community. I'm not opposed in principle to an election process similar to stewards (with board appointment), but I'm concerned that might lead to a subcommittee of members with little or no applicable expertise or experience, or with a political agenda.
The policy is not applied retroactively, particularly given that existing projects are outside the subcommittee's scope. However, any adjustment in the criteria are of course applied to all future decisions, regardless of when the request was first filed. It would be difficult to track changes and only enforce the policy in place at the time each request was filed, and counterproductive to do so since the adjustments are aimed at improving the sustainability of good projects and filtering out bad projects.
The language subcommittee's name is a little bit misleading, which often leads to questions about why we don't also process closures or make decisions about existing projects. Maybe in the future the subcommittee will be assigned further responsibilities, but right now a more correct name would be something like "new language subdomain subcommittee". We have nothing at all to do with closures (still processed by community voting) or temporary sysophood (processed by stewards on < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions
).
If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact me or respond here.
-- Yours cordially, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)
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