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

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

Hi Jesse and Gerard,

thanks for you valuable comments. Actually, I needed some time to think
about the issue.

I appreciate your points and I can leave with the fact that there are no
written policies, and that requirements are slightly different from
project to project. I also see a great improvement in the recent months,
for instance, a large group of incubator projects has been given the
conditionally approved status etc.

Still, I also see that people are desperate to leave comments on all
available discussion pages, claiming that though the projects they are
promoting fulfilled all the requirements still no decision is coming after
months. This may sound a technical problem but in fact for a smaller
language opening a project is a big deal which gets media attention and
helps a lot to attract new contributors. Even a technical delay of a
couple of months for creation of an already approved wp may have some
negative media coverage.

My understanding (please correct me if I am wrong on the point) is that
this is happening since the manpower behind the decision is insufficient:
the committee is not big enough, some of the members of the committee are
not active, and in the end only several members have to do all the job.
Whatever excellent these members are, this slows down things enormously.

This brings an obvious question: if the members are neither elected nor
appointed by an authoritative body, why do not you just take more people
who would be willing to do the job? I am not sure what the optimum size of
the committee would be, but I think at the present stage just recruiting
more members would really help speeding out things and at least sorting
out the requests which are there for months without any changes.

Another thing is dealing with the existing projects. I would still find it
more logical if the same body deals with the creation of new projects and
audit of existing projects, even if the criteria might be different for
the two things. I am not sure who has to decide, and it would definitely
require more manpower, but such development would definitely make sense
for me.

Cheers,
Yaroslav

> Hello Yaroslav,
>
> Before I try to answer your questions, please keep in mind that the
> language subcommittee never makes any official public messages; any
> comments by subcommittee members, including myself, are personal
> comments that don't necessarily reflect subcommittee opinion as a
> whole. The 100-article limit noted by GerardM is a personal criteria
> and not an official requirement (as listed at <
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy#Requisites
>>), though it of course comes up in constructive subcommittee
> discussion about each project.
>
> The official policy for the approval of new subdomains is public at <
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy >. This
> policy is applied equally to all requests (barring rare exceptional
> cases). The subcommittee is specifically entrusted by the board with
> developing the policy to ensure that new projects flourish, and to
> avoid inactive or problematic projects as we have had in the past. So
> far we have had great success, but suggestions are always welcome.
>
> I try my best to make subcommittee decisions as transparent as
> possible. I archive all subcommittee discussion to <
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_subcommittees/Languages/Archives
>>, although recent messages have not yet been archived because I was
> away over December. The policy is also public, and you can track
> changes by simply watching the page history. In addition, the page at
> < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages > shows
> the status of every current and recently closed request, as well as
> the date the status last changed. Further, there are a set of
> statistics on test projects at <
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pathoschild/Status >, and
> I'll be finishing a public comprehensive analysis tool in the next few
> days to replace them. If you have any viable suggestions for more
> transparency, feel free to contact me any time.
>
> Members of the language subcommittee are not openly elected. The
> original members were approved by the special projects committee, and
> additional members where appointed by subcommittee consensus from the
> community. I'm not opposed in principle to an election process similar
> to stewards (with board appointment), but I'm concerned that might
> lead to a subcommittee of members with little or no applicable
> expertise or experience, or with a political agenda.
>
> The policy is not applied retroactively, particularly given that
> existing projects are outside the subcommittee's scope. However, any
> adjustment in the criteria are of course applied to all future
> decisions, regardless of when the request was first filed. It would be
> difficult to track changes and only enforce the policy in place at the
> time each request was filed, and counterproductive to do so since the
> adjustments are aimed at improving the sustainability of good projects
> and filtering out bad projects.
>
> The language subcommittee's name is a little bit misleading, which
> often leads to questions about why we don't also process closures or
> make decisions about existing projects. Maybe in the future the
> subcommittee will be assigned further responsibilities, but right now
> a more correct name would be something like "new language subdomain
> subcommittee". We have nothing at all to do with closures (still
> processed by community voting) or temporary sysophood (processed by
> stewards on < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions
>>).
>
> If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact
> me or respond here.
>
> --
> Yours cordially,
> Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)
>
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