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Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
- Why is it improperly labeled? This helps to prevent issues in the future.
As noted in other response -- the summary didn't refer to the language requested, so could not be easily found or prioritized in response to inquiries.
- The mailing list of the language committee is available for members of the
language committee only. The language committee works by full consensus, consequently when any one objects to something that needs approval, it is not approved. So consequently we do not have anything to show for you, but as has been indicated befor,e at the time when the status of eligibility was to be decided for Egyptian Arabic, the question was raised by me if it should be considered eligible and this was discussed on the list, the answer we agreed on was "yes".
How many people actually, actively, agreed to it, and on what basis?
- I do not know who told you that only two members discussed this but given
the way that only one voice is enough to prevent something from going through, it does not need much discussion when people approve.
- So we do discuss things when we find a need for it.
As an operational matter, we need to be able to rely on the langcom's decisions to carry weight, or else we have to do more individual research into your requests, which means we can't respond to them as quickly as you'd like.
If a failure to discuss is taken as approval, this may indicate that the committee's process is dysfunctional.
Typically, a quorum (minimum number of discussion participants) is required to ensure that adequate attention has been paid to requests. Does the language committee currently have a quorum requirement? What is it, and was it reached in this particular discussion?
- What we do not find is that when requests are approved and accepted by the
board that they are created. It is not the first time that this proved a problem.
Please note that setup of language subdomains of existing project sites is totally outside the scope of the business of the board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The business of the board is to set a direction for the company, hire an executive to manage the day-to-day operations of the company moving in that direction, and provide oversight of how well the company is doing that job and whether the company is spending donor money effectively.
If operational requests you care about are behind, don't waste your or the board's time invoking the board -- come to me directly and ask what's the hold-up.
In this case, the general hold-up for a long time was simply that the tech team was spending most effort on low-level site operations; reconfiguration and new wiki setup requests were handled either by volunteer admins doing general housecleaning on the queue, or by direct handling of a particular request brought to our attention.
Apparently this particular request was either unseen or uninteresting to volunteer admins going through the queue, and no one reached out specifically to us about it.
We're now clearing out general backlogs and are trying to ensure that the requests are legitimate -- there's nothing less fun than changing a site configuration or setting up a new language site and then finding out the community didn't actually want it!
If the existing infrastructure for language setup approval is not working effectively at establishing a firm consensus, I'd like to make sure we fix that process -- it'll be easier on everybody. Approved requests will carry more weight, they'll get taken care of faster, and we're less likely to have to reverse something already set up.
- -- brion