This is my argument (or rather, my quickly hashed out rambling) as to why the community draft for the language proposal policy should become our official policy, in place of the current one. My argument is fairly long, but I hope that it does not descend into irrelevance and that people will read it through to the end.

The community draft language proposal policy has the advantage of being, in the Wikimedia spirit, a more collaborative work. The current language proposal policy was made by a small group, but the community draft was, as its name suggests, open to ideas from anyone who had any, and I think that it is a better reflection of the feeling of Wikimedia users than the current one.

I want to be very clear that I believe the language proposal system we have now is far better than the one we had before: it is fairer, quicker and more efficient. However, although it is better than the last one, it is not as good as it could be.

Some Wikimedia users (and I am certainly part of this group) thought it unfair that, whilst artificial languages such as Esperanto and Volupak were allowed by this policy to have Wikipedias, classical languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek were not, on the grounds that, since they have no native speakers, they do not serve a community and are therefore at odds with the foundation's mission statement. This seems like both a contradiction and a questionable interpretation of the foundation's mission statement. With this in mind, one of the requisites for eligibility in the current policy:

“The proposal has a sufficient number of living native speakers to form a viable community and audience. (Wikisource wikis are allowed in languages with no native speakers, although these should be on a wiki for the modern form of the language if possible.)

If the proposal is for an artificial language such as Esperanto, it must have a reasonable degree of recognition as determined by discussion (this requirement is being discussed by the language subcommittee).” Has been changed to this in the community draft:

“The proposal has a sufficient worldwide number of people able to express themselves at a fluent level, in the written, spoken or signed form, to form a viable community and audience.

If the proposal is for a language without native speakers, it will need to be demonstrated that it is well attested in written texts, and is in current use as a special, auxiliary, engineered, classical or learned language.” The community draft's requisite reflects the fact that a viable community and audience does not need native speakers, not everyone wishes to use a Wikipedia in his or her native language, and that knowledge gained in one's second, third or nth language is just as good as knowledge gained in one's first language. Latin, for example, was the Lingua Franca of Western Europe for much of the second millennium, even though it had no native speakers (or, at most, a negligible number); had Wikimedia, with its current language proposal policy, existed at that time, it would not have been eligible for a Wikipedia, despite being the language in which a Wikipedia would be most useful. Today, the English language has a similar role; who would bat an eyelid at an internet community that used English despite having no native speakers of the language? If there were no native English speakers today the English language Wikipedia would still be a very useful project, but would be deemed by the current policy to not have a “viable community and audience”. I admit that these arguments may seem a little far-fetched, but I hope they show that there is a problem with the policy as it stands. I believe that by allowing people to share and receive knowledge in classical languages as well as modern ones we would better fulfil the Wikimedia Foundation's mission statement: “The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”

The community draft also specifies how much of the interface has to be translated before final approval for both first projects in a language and projects in languages that already have projects. By requiring the 500 most-used messages to be translated for a first project, the policy sets a goal that is tough but reasonable. Requiring too many messages to be translated before the creation of the project would be likely to tire-out a smaller community (which would, of course, grow once the project was actually created). Not requiring any would make it easier for languages without much real support to slip through the net (I think that this part of the process should be used not only to make sure that the language has an interface, but also as another part of the test to see whether a language is suitable for the project). By requiring 500 messages to be translated we can ensure that people are serious about the project and have enough motivation, that the language (if it is classical) is capable of expressing modern concepts and that potential editors are not *too* over-worked during what is (let's be honest) the most boring part of the process. It is more sensible to require a grater number of messages to be translated before the creation of another project in a language because a language that already has at least one Wikimedia project should have a bigger community. Contrary to what one might infer from the length of my argument, the community draft actually proposes very few changes from the current policy; in fact, it is probably better thought of as a fine-tuning of the current policy rather than a completely new one, and I hope that other will agree with me that the few changes that the community proposes to make to the policy will make it better.