Erik Moeller wrote:
I'd say a minimum of 10,000 active speakers is a requirement for creating an encyclopedia. Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that requirement.
Does Latin meet that requirement? The aboriginal Sami minority in northern Sweden, Norway and Finland numbers 85,000 people and it is not clear to me whether they speak one language with six dialects or six different languages. Many wrongs have been done to these folks in history, and I think it is fair to assume that the same goes for many other language minorities throughout the world. It seems unnecessary to raise more artificial barriers.
If a Sami or Kashubian encyclopedia or one in Toki Pona is a really bad idea, it will die or fade away from its own failure, and the contributors cannot blame anyone else for their own failure.
But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation as a serious project.
If this is the problem, why not solve this problem. Split the lists in two or three different lists: Languages with more than 20K articles can be considered "useful" encyclopedias, languages with 1K-20K articles can be listed as "developing" encyclopedias, and languages with less than 1K articles are "experimental". Every big corporation or organization has "experimental" projects which can fail without risking the credibility of the whole.
Currently, eight languages have more than 20K articles (English, German, Japanese, French, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish). Another 26 languages have 1K-20K articles, including Esperanto, Chinese, Hebrew, Interlingua, Basque, Latin, and Walloon.