[Foundation-l] Fwd: Tokipona

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The existing policy explicitly makes an exception for constructed languages.
This policy was agreed by both the language committee and the board. The
current climate is for the wrong reasons against constructed languages. In
my opinion the arguments against constructed languages are flaky at best.
The one thing people do not appreciate is that if a sufficient large body of
editors quietly works for a language, it hardly costs us any money.
Harddrives are cheap, when few people read the information it does not cost
us much bandwidth either. Here the media is the message and the message is
that the same information is brought in a different format.

When people argue against constructed languages they argue against something
that has no value to them. It is the same argument why teachers in Africa
physically punish their students when they do not speak English. When you
are of this opinion, you find organisations like the UNESCO on the other
side of the argument. They made 2008 the Year of Languages in order to make
the case that we lose out when cultures and languages disappear.

It is for all these reasons that I argue that we can look really sharp
before we approve another conlang. We can discriminate against them by
having extra rigid demands. But denying them is not in our interest it makes
us look like exclusionists while in actual fact we want to bring information
to all people. And bringing information in a conlang is information that is
of interest and importance to a sizable group of people.

FYI Brion indicated at some stage that he is interested in Esperanto. To do
him a favour I added Esperanto as an editable language in OmegaWiki. It
currently has 2276 expressions and I would not be surprised when I added
more than half of these. Yes, we do Lojban, and Ido too.
Thanks,
      GerardM
2276
2276
2276
2276

Thanks,
     GerardM.

On Jan 21, 2008 8:52 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Jesse,
>
> Regarding discussions in the committee now covering constructed
> languages - are you saying there is discussion on an exception for
> conlangs to the policy described by Gerard? I think this would be a
> mistake, not least because it would lead to requests for similar
> exceptions in other cases.
>
> Nathan
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>