[Foundation-l] Sassarese and Sardinian

[Gianluigi Gamba]

2007/9/10, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com>:
> ...Since it is highly political, and not genuinely linguistics, I think
> we need to establish a general consensus toward the issue: if a
> certain local community or even limited to the government tries to
> standardize their language in an official but artificial manner, and
> they have no real speaker yet, we accept such language as part of our
> project. I am not sure if there is a general consensus to support such
> experimental activities on Wikimedia community, though, being aware we
> know some successful cases in the history.

Often local-language projects do not reach that critical mass of
active users that makes a project self-sustained. This happens because
the community is too small, or it hasn't sufficient access to the
internet, or because a common written language is not defined.

My personal attitude is that we should grant every community a chance
to open a wikipedia in their own language, but once that wikipedia
exists, the community must be committed to make that wikipedia alive
and growing.

I'd allow the local wikipedias to "conquer on the battlefield" their
right to exist, by giving them a term (one year? two years?) after
which deciding whether the experiment turned out successful enough to
avoid a closure. Such success should be measured by the number of the
articles, the databse size, the topics covered and the average depth
of the articles, the number of active users and sysops and their
trend.

G.