But that is my opinion. What do you think; should wikis be allowed in every extinct language?

In my opinion, Pathoschild is a bit unhonest here. As far as I know, nobody ever proposed to allow _every_ language. His post on this list is based on the discussion here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Language_subcommittee#Latina_Wikipedia_Closing_and_hellenic_Wikipedia_opening.

Somebody proposed a Wikipedia in Classical Greek a long time ago and the proposal was rejected based on the "Language proposal policy", which does not allow for projects in languages with no native speakers. But actually the word "native" was inserted by Pathoschild only in October 2007. At that time the proposal for a Classical Greek project was already running for 14 months.

The current policy wouldn't allow for a Wikipedia in Latin nor for a Wikipedia in Esperanto. I think, this is proof, that the current policy is failing. If the UN (hypothetically) would adopt a new constructed language as new worldwide lingua franca, there would be no way no create a wikipedia in this world language under current policy until this language would develop a native community, which would take some decades at least. The policy fails.

Get rid of the word "native" in the policy. Base decisions on the ability to build a viable and useful resource and not on physical features of the language. In my opinion Classical Greek can form a viable community and build a useful resource. Some of you may think "He only wants to push his pet language Greek!" No, I actually have nothing to do with Greek and I prefer spoken languages to scholarly languages. I only jumped into the discussion, cause I realized Greek was about to go being denied for reasons of policy-nitpicking only.

Marcus Buck Slomox