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

[Dan Rosenthal]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 3:52 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Latin Wikisource community could and should be a boisterous
> project, with their own Latin "Wikisource News" discussing sources and
> topics of interest.  The opportunity to have a vibrant community in
> the Latin language exists on four wikimedia projects, yet the project
> namespace of these four projects is a wasteland.  If people who want
> to work in these languages cant congregate around a project dedicated
> to the works which make the language still worth studying, I doubt
> that they are serious practitioners of the language.
>
> I think a Wikinews in Latin could work, but I would rather it be
> rejected until such time as the existing Latin projects have a
> functioning community, as "admin-grade" contributors and community
> builders that are proficient in Latin should concentrate on the
> existing projects.
>
> --
> John Mark Vandenberg
>
> __
>

A project cannot be a boisterous, thriving project, it cannot have the
opportunity to grow and attract users, if it is never created. Your argument
doesn't address the fact that even English language projects, such as
Wikiversity, are not growing with huge leaps and bounds either. English
Wikiversity had less than 125 edits or so yesterday, around 20 or so which
were either to Requests for Custodianship (equivalent to RFA) or the
Custodian noticeboard. The remainder include user talk and userpage edits,
new user creation logs, and other such stuff. Yet we wouldn't consider
closing the english wikiversity, or denying its inclusion if it were not yet
formed. Not every project can be Wikipedia. Wikinews, of the non-pedia
projects, has the potential to have a steady number of new edits and growth,
since it generally doesn't require as much prior knowledge or subject matter
expertise as the other projects do. I notice there are no criticisms of
latin wikipedia there. It's doing quite well for itself, with a functioning
community. If we don't create new projects in those languages, what kind of
message does it send to the contributors to the already existing projects in
that language, about the appreciation for their work?
-Dan
-- 
Dan Rosenthal