[Foundation-l] Please REJECT the latin wikinews project. inmediatly

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> Latin Wikinews? another playground?  seriously, these people (those who are
> making the request) should concentrate on their projects in their other
> language.

Unfortunately, a lot of volunteer project work happens only and
precisely because some core of people are interested in doing that
particular thing, and only that particular thing.

In large volunteer projects, you get things done by letting as many
people get as involved as they want to do the things that they want,
and successfully diverting a fraction of the total effort off in
largescale management / directed activities required for the
infrastructure.  That diversion is a matter of skill and guile by the
managers in many cases 8-)

In this particular case - we might get those people to do something
else, sure.  But the odds are high that they won't.

If the project wouldn't hurt us somehow or be somehow contrary to
policy as is, stopping it from happening practically just means that
less people work on Wikipedia overall.  It won't help out other
Wikipedia projects at all.

I don't think that we miss out much not having a news project in a
dead language.  It's rather silly, yes.  But it doesn't harm anyone,
and we might eventually co-opt people involved into the wider project,
so why not?


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com