[Foundation-l] [Langcom-l] Ancient Greek reconstructed an analysis of a proposal for a new Wikipedia

[Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)]

Gerard,

I disagree with your proposal.

I think some of the proposed criteria are very arbitrary. What is
"sufficiently expressive" for a modern encyclopedia? Does that prevent
many natural languages (such as Navajo) which don't have words for
advanced technology? Wouldn't "insufficiently expressive" languages be
perfectly sufficient for the vast majority of concepts, even if they
might not have an article on quantum superstring theory?

Further, I've painstakingly followed every thread in this discussion,
and I have not seen any strong argument for allowing languages nobody
uses natively. Wikimedia wikis exist to make the sum of human
knowledge available to everyone, not to practice or preserve
languages.

I think the argument that they act as a common language for scholars
of the ancient language is not valid; we are not a forum for academic
exchange. An English scholar of Ancient Greek can (and probably does)
use English in his everyday life, including research and
communication. An exception can (and is) made for Wikisource, which
exists to collect existing literature, but other projects in dead
languages do not serve our mission. A scholar of Proto-Indo-European
does not communicate in Proto-Indo-European.

So while I'm open to further debate, I currently disagree with this change.

(As an aside, the vague statement in the policy you point out is only
there because you consistently blocked a majority agreement to remove
it.)

-- 
Yours cordially,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)