In message 4187F785.4090905@hackish.org, Delirium delirium@hackish.org writes
Mark Williamson wrote:
If you think I go around selecting random languages to request new Wikipedias for, then you are very very very wrong. Before I do anything like that, I make sure there is at least one potential contributor, and preferrably more or some community involvement.
There does seem to be an odd mismatch in that you have no personally ability to speak these languages. I'd wager that were these requests coming from people who *actually speak the languages*, they would be taken more seriously. When that has happened, as with Welsh, there were no arguments over creating the Wikipedia for that language.
Actually, I don't know the history of the Welsh Wikipedia -- it appears to have been set up with the phase 2 software, a few not very good articles which mostly resembled a sandbox were created, and then abandoned. It was converted to Phase 3 fairly early on, at which point I discovered it. As no-one seemed to be using it, I asked for admin status and set about creating some articles and creating LanguageCy.php (no small task when the language is somewhat lacking in computing terms and you're checking most of the words against two dictionaries!). Pretty soon [[cy:Defnyddwr:Deb]] arrived and things took off, to the point where we now have a nice little encyclopaedia with around half a dozen regular contributors and about 2700 articles.