[Foundation-l] Allow new wikis in extinct languages?
Marcus Buck
me at marcusbuck.org
Sat Mar 29 23:47:52 UTC 2008
>
> But that is my opinion. What do you think; should wikis be allowed in
> every extinct language?
In my opinion, Pathoschild is a bit unhonest here. As far as I know,
nobody ever proposed to allow _every_ language. His post on this list is
based on the discussion here:
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Language_subcommittee#Latina_Wikipedia_Closing_and_hellenic_Wikipedia_opening>.
Somebody proposed a Wikipedia in Classical Greek a long time ago and the
proposal was rejected based on the "Language proposal policy", which
does not allow for projects in languages with no native speakers. But
actually the word "native" was inserted by Pathoschild only in October
2007. At that time the proposal for a Classical Greek project was
already running for 14 months.
The current policy wouldn't allow for a Wikipedia in Latin nor for a
Wikipedia in Esperanto. I think, this is proof, that the current policy
is failing. If the UN (hypothetically) would adopt a new constructed
language as new worldwide lingua franca, there would be no way no create
a wikipedia in this world language under current policy until this
language would develop a native community, which would take some decades
at least. The policy fails.
Get rid of the word "native" in the policy. Base decisions on the
ability to build a viable and useful resource and not on physical
features of the language.
In my opinion Classical Greek can form a viable community and build a
useful resource. Some of you may think "He only wants to push his pet
language Greek!" No, I actually have nothing to do with Greek and I
prefer spoken languages to scholarly languages. I only jumped into the
discussion, cause I realized Greek was about to go being denied for
reasons of policy-nitpicking only.
Marcus Buck
Slomox
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