[Foundation-l] policy on languages without native speakers

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
You are wrong. The policy has the approval of the board. All the languages
that we think should be approved are approved by the board. We suggest that
a project can be approved and when we do not hear anything to the contrary
it is approved after a week.
Thanks,
      GerardM

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:

> Marcos Cramer hett schreven:
> > Currently the language subcommittee decides both about the language
> proposal policy and about its implemenation in particular cases.
> "Separation of powers". At the moment the language subcommittee is
> legislative (it is allowed to change the policy) and judiciary (it
> decides on approving or denying proposals for new projects) at the same
> time. Only the executive (finally creating the projects) lies in the
> hands of the developers.
>
> By the way, if I didn't miss any posts in this lengthy threads regarding
> the language proposal policy, I still didn't get any answers to my
> proposal on <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Slomox/Languages>.
> The proposal names criteria for new projects which are completely based
> on decidable facts like size of the potential readership and project
> activity. Criteria like
> > * New literature is still being produced and published in the proposed
> language (whether translated or original)
> > * The proposed language is taught in a number of institutions like
> schools or universities.
> make judgments on the "usefulness" of languages. Many living native
> languages would fail on criteria like those. Of course you could just
> use them for languages without native speakers, but in my opinion a
> "good" rule should work without exceptions and "special rules". "My"
> rules only judge the "potential" of languages to be useful, which is
> much more in line with the aim of "providing" knowledge. (If there are
> _no_ schools and universities in a specific language, this makes a
> Wikipedia even _more_ useful in my opinion, doesn't it? Cause it could
> provide knowledge provided by nobody else.) Just count the speakers of
> the language. If there are enough speakers - regardless of whether they
> are native or not as long as they are fluent - it is useful. This rule
> sorts out "unwanted" languages like fantasy languages or unpopular
> planned languages or (really) dead languages etc. by itself, without
> special rules "discriminating" (that is, special rules explicitly
> created to rule out the unwanted languages) them.
> Perhaps the lack of comments on my proposals - in a "dispute culture"
> like here on this list - means, there is not much to disagree with and
> to dispute about my proposal ;-)
>
> Marcus Buck
>
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