On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:05:15 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
"Repercussions on the other projects"?
Why should it be up to the community to decide this?
There is a difference between saying that the entire Wikipedia userbase must approve any new language, and disagreeing with your suggestion that
all those who are native speakers of the language and are interested in building a Wikipedia in it should be allowed to vote. It shouldn't be anybody else's decision if they get a Wikipedia in their language or not.
For myself, I don't much buy the argument that approving a related language/dialect Foo of an existing Wikipedia language Bar will lead a to a huge drain on the userbase of Bar: Plattsdeutsch or Luxembourgish have apparently not drawn too many people away from German, etc. Furthermore, I agree with you in opposing any idea that general speakers of Bar should vote on the inclusion of Foo.
However, the question of developer and network administrator resources seems to me to be important. Wikimedia is a nonprofit organization with many goals in its mission, one of which is to promote the distribution of knowledge in many languages, including minority ones. While this is an important goal, I would not want to see the foundation constrained by explicit policy to spend its resources on minority languages if it decided that its mission could be better served another way.
Steve