On 6/27/05, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with Wouter. In addition, I think there should be some sort of policy on what is allowed a test wiki. It shouldn't be a place for wikis to start up in languages that have been completely rejected by the community. For example, if there's no consensus on Sindarin, it shouldn't be able to get around that decision by setting up on Meta.
Meta is its own project; it isn't clear to me that other Wikipedias need to tell it how to handle its own deletion policy. Sindarin couldn't set up an encyclopedia worth of pages on Meta, because the normal RfD process would get rid of them. But it could have an effective page demonstrating what a Sindarin Main Page would look like -- such a page would inevitably have a discussion about Sindarin WP (and its lack of consensus) on its discussion page.
The test wiki area needs to be strictly for wikis which do have a real possibility of becoming Wikipedia languages.
Why not open that space to test wikis of all varieties? Anything which might become its own project, or which does not clearly belong in any one existing project, could have a text space to help clarify what its goals would be, and to inform discussion about it.
For instance, http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/wiki/Bevelheads:Home is too specific to be a separate project, but looks as though it would have much excellent, specific information for Wikipedia. Some of it might be too detailed for "Wikipedia as of 2005", but I imagine that Wikipedia as of 2010 will have found elegant ways to handle that level of detail on every subject.