[Foundation-l] Allow new wikis in extinct languages?

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
>  Please keep in mind, that the mission of the Wikimedia
>  Foundation is to bring knowledge to the people. Knowledge which was
>  previously not available to them (if it would have been available,
>  Wikipedia and the other projects would have been pointless). Not
>  available cause companies/publishers wanted to/had to make money with it
>  and they couldn't afford it. Or not available cause they spoke the wrong
>  language or their society not being wealthy enough, so that no publisher
>  even tried to publish works providing this knowledge.

This seems to put the burden of proof onto the content consumers,
instead of the content providers. That is, we shouldn't have a project
for a particular language unless there are established groups of
people available to consume content in that language. We can ignore
the issue of Wikisource and Wikiquote, for now, since those projects
aim to consolidate and preserve existing knowledge, and you can't
really do that unless there is existing knowledge to preserve. For
those two projects the burden of proof needs to lie with the content
producers, not the content consumers.

>  This should be done for every language. Regardless of whether there
>  already is scholarly work in the language. If _we_ aim at providing
>  knowledge to them, why should we demand existing "knowledge providers"
>  like universities or newspapers? "You want to aquire knowledge? Okay,
>  please furnish proof that you have enough knowledge first!"

We shouldn't do EVERY language. It's not just about demanding
preexisting content, but we also need to ensure that there is a viable
community of project editors. A wiki cannot exist if there are no
editors.  We should also take into consideration, if only
peripherally, the existence of readers and content consumers.

If there are editors but no readers, the project essentially becomes
one of knowledge obfuscation, not knowledge sharing. If I take
information that I have and I write it in language X for which there
are no readers, that information is "hidden" from everybody but
myself. It becomes little more then a complicated encryption system.
The WMF is certainly not in the habit of encrypting and hiding
information. To recap, there are several things that should be
considered before creating a new language project:

1) Is there a viable community of editors? We can gauge this based on
translations at Betawiki, and on activity at the incubator
2) Is there a community of potential readers? The community of readers
should not exactly overlap the community of editors (or else we run
into an encryption problem, like I outlined above).
3) Are there any other additional restrictions that we need to
consider on a per-project basis? that is, does it make sense to have a
wikinews, wikisource, or wikiversity in this particular language?

Of course, how we define words like "viable" and "community" is still
up in the air.

--Andrew Whitworth