Jimmy Wales wrote:

I do think we need some serious reform of our language policy to end what I see as an ongoing

drive

to reclassify every dialect in the world into a standalone language.

In my opinion the most important point would be having an official policy on this issue at all. Currently, there is a big vacuum only partly filled by some nonofficial guidelines. This naturally causes expectations that can't really be fulfilled as well as a disproportionate amount of discussion. Both of which is not constructive with regard to our primary aims.

As pointed out already, various users have put quite a bit of effort into developing a proposal for a workable policy regarding new languages for Wikimedia projects. However, at the same time most people have been aware that turning this proposal into "something official" would be the harder part (or, in other words, more or less impossible). As far as I recall, even a board member was asked in September I think if the Board could decide some general guidelines here (only general guidelines, no decisions on individual cases) because it looks like this issue is not really solvable within the community. However, as far as I remember, the notion back then was that this is up to the community.

However, my impression is that we don't have any real mechanisms here for implementing such fundamental decisions within any reasonable span of time. Thus, a board decision based upon the community's input concerning the issue would probably mean a real step forward.

Arbeo

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