In the discussion on setting up Ladino, Angela gave some useful information which included that (paraphrasing from memory) "for natural languages, once there are five supporters and no objections, it can be set up".
I'm interested in how the standards differ for "unnatural languages", and/or what the line of demarcation is (or are there several). I'm also interested in what happens if there *is* an objection to a particular language. As an Esperantist (but not denaska) I always see a red flag in the phrase "natural languages", since subjectively to me Esperanto is quite as natural as my original native langauge, English, and much more natural than my attempts at, say, Dutch. But the case I have in mind is Chinook Jargon. I've been talking up the idea of a Chinuk Wawa Wikipedia on CJ mailing lists, and there is some favorable response. But is it a "natural language"? (And if not, what hoops does it have to jump through to get a wiki?) It started out, after all, as sort of the Esperanto of the Northwest Coast. Now it survives in actual spoken use mainly on the Grand Ronde Reservation in Oregon, though there are hundreds of people around the world who use it to some extent in writing (including on the web), most of whom use a form closer to the original pidgin than to the creole now spoken at GR; but all these people consider themselves in some sense members of a single language community.
Haruo