This is not the first time meta is used to test things before they are set (or even if there are never set). Be it new policies, new templates, new languages of existing projects or even new projects.
I think it is really okay.
A good habit is typically to delete all these articles after the issue is resolved. This has been done quite often : the authors of such test pages often put them for deletion after they have become useless.
I think it is good management to let people room, provided they do not abuse the public space.
Ant
Mark Williamson a écrit:
Well, Angela and Anthere both seem to endorse it.
The idea actually started with, I believe, the Cantonese debate where Felix Wan decided to go start a Cantonese Test-wikipedia to show people that it really /can/ be done.
I encouraged him, not thinking much about it being against the rules of meta.
After that, I personally suggested the same thing to Amikeco, the founder of the Ossetic Wikipedia, although he had already created an off-site demo.
I suggested the same thing for Scots a while back, in fact I started it myself and let actual Scotsmen populate it with content.
Seelterfraisk was started by HaafLimbo iirc (his username at the Limburgish Wikipedia where I seem it most often because I still have it in my list of Wikipedias I monitor, he's called Wouter Steenbeek on the list I think), at my suggestion.
I personally started Skandinavisk as a test case to see how a bit of clever language planning might positively effect the Scandinavian Wikipedia community. As anybody who knows any Scandinavian language will see, it is not quite Danish or Bokmål, but not quite Swedish either and not Nynorsk. (definitely not Icelandic or Faroese). It is an attempt at an artificially-engineered Scandinavian "happy medium" and I have so far only used it in the context of test-wp.
Fiu-vro was created entirely without my knowledge, and I believe that (and its use of the main article space rather than /test-wp/fiu-vro/ARTICLENAME) is what alerted Aphralagia to the existance of the essperimentu.
Salutatziones Mark
On 20/05/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
So how does that square with people being told on this list to create a test version on Meta if they want a new language Wikipedia?
Can anyone answer this?
Maybe whoever told them that could explain it. It seems a bit odd.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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