[Foundation-l] IYL'08: Moratorium on deleting language projects?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The projects that are being closed are not being closed to any particular
policy. That is bad in and of itself. What is good is that we at least have
an understanding that projects can go to the Incubator to revive them.
Project with no localisation, with less then 100 articles are hardly
relevant on any scale. The language committee has no dealing with the
pre-existing projects, this is in many ways a mixed blessing.

The new projects for a new language have at least minimal localisation, what
is considered minimal is determined by the people at BetaWiki; they are the
most relevant messages for our READERS. For subsequent projects we insist on
a full localisation of MediaWiki and this policy is bearing fruit; the
MediaWiki languages is particularly good for languages that want to start a
new project. A good example is Sranan Tongo that only recently was given
conditional approval and started localisation and is doing well.

When people vote for a particular project to start, they do not realise that
their vote is quite meaningless. People are in favour or against often for
political reasons. The only thing they do is create a stir. People who walk
the walk and talk the talk make the difference. People who create credible
articles in the Incubator, people that do the localisation. People that
create a presence for their language once the project is approved.

Projects are approved and they are sometimes for languages that are quite
small. It takes a few dedicated people to start a new language and, it takes
dedication, prolonged dedication to make a successful project. We are HAPPY
to approve new languages and projects and, I do want to make the
International Year of Languages a success by making sure that the
localisation of MediaWiki is a cornerstone to what makes a Wikipedia
relevant combined with a minimum of well written articles.

If you want to have Wikipedias for African languages, then people that are
literate in those languages have to show their interest. Wikipedia is a
written project. When people want localisation, we can now help them by
creating .po files for MediaWiki. This allows for the use of tools like
Computer Aided Translation tools. Open Progress has financially supported
the Wikiread functionality for OmegaT (a GPL licensed CAT tool). We hope to
get you Wikiwrite as well so that you can both read and write MediaWiki
articles from withing OmegaT.

Stopping the closure of WMF projects is currently not in the cards. There
are people who do not appreciate the relevance of supporting under resourced
languages and are really aggressive. The only sane thing is to be prudent in
approving new projects. As to the differentiation of incubator projects,
this is effectively already the case for Wikibooks. However, for a separate
language version of Wikibooks, approval is required.

Where you suggest stronger requirements when a language already exists, this
is already the case. For a follow up project the localisation has to be
complete. This means that the Turkish request for a Wikiversity will wait
until this requirement is met. (The Turkish language projects are lively and
not problematic). In essence the suggestions are already in place.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On Jan 3, 2008 9:32 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I agree though that clear and transparent rules must be established for
> > the release of the projects from the incubator.
>
> I agree with this wholeheartedly. If we are going to have a moratorium
> on closing projects, then we should also have a moratorium on opening
> new projects. These should only last until we have developed a such a
> clear policy concerning project creations and closings. Such a
> moratorium should not last for an entire year.
>
> I think that we create far too many projects, certainly more then we
> have the communities to support them. The key word here is
> "community". one or two speakers of the language who show some
> interest do not constitute a "community".
>
> I propose that small languages should not get differentiated projects.
> That is, we should have either:
>
> (a) multilingual per-project incubators (multilingual wikipedia,
> multilingual wikibooks, etc) where all small languages would develop
> content and communities until such time as they were established
> enough to get their own projects, or
>
> (b) have undifferentiated per-language projects for languages that are
> too small. That is, for a small language, they would only have a
> single project that was wikipedia, wikibooks, wiktionary, etc. As the
> project grew and gained community support, it could be differentiated
> into separate projects.
>
> By doing either of these things, we prevent creating projects that
> have no support, but we are still able to offer support to small
> languages.
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
>
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