[Foundation-l] Why we should use the community draft of the language proposal policy

[Leigh Babbage]

This is my argument (or rather, my
quickly hashed out rambling) as to why the community draft for the
language proposal policy should become our official policy, in place
of the current one. My argument is fairly long, but I hope that it
does not descend into irrelevance and that people will read it
through to the end.



The community draft language proposal
policy has the advantage of being, in the Wikimedia spirit, a more
collaborative work. The current language proposal policy was made by
a small group, but the community draft was, as its name suggests,
open to ideas from anyone who had any, and I think that it is a
better reflection of the feeling of Wikimedia users than the current
one.



I want to be very clear that I believe
the language proposal system we have now is far better than the one
we had before: it is fairer, quicker and more efficient. However,
although it is better than the last one, it is not as good as it
could be.



Some Wikimedia users (and I am
certainly part of this group) thought it unfair that, whilst
artificial languages such as Esperanto and Volupak were allowed by
this policy to have Wikipedias, classical languages such as Latin and
Ancient Greek were not, on the grounds that, since they have no
native speakers, they do not serve a community and are therefore at
odds with the foundation's mission statement. This seems like both a
contradiction and a questionable interpretation of the foundation's
mission statement. With this in mind, one of the requisites for
eligibility in the current policy:



“The proposal has a sufficient
number of living native speakers to form a viable community and
audience. (Wikisource wikis are allowed in languages with no native
speakers, although these should be on a wiki for the modern form of
the language if possible.) 

If the proposal is for an
	artificial language such as Esperanto,
	it must have a reasonable degree of recognition as determined by
	discussion (this requirement is being discussed by the language
	subcommittee).”
	Has been changed to this in the community draft:

“The proposal has a sufficient worldwide number of people able to
express themselves at a fluent level, in the written, spoken or
signed form, to form a viable community and audience. 

If the proposal is for a
	language without native speakers, it will need to be demonstrated
	that it is well attested in written texts, and is in current use as
	a special, auxiliary, engineered, classical or learned language.”
	The community draft's requisite
	reflects the fact that a viable community and audience does not need
	native speakers, not everyone wishes to use a Wikipedia in his or
	her native language, and that knowledge gained in one's second,
	third or nth language
	is just as good as knowledge gained in one's first language. Latin,
	for example, was the Lingua Franca of Western Europe for much of the
	second millennium, even though it had no native speakers (or, at
	most, a negligible number); had Wikimedia, with its current language
	proposal policy, existed at that time, it would not have been
	eligible for a Wikipedia, despite being the language in which a
	Wikipedia would be most useful. Today, the English language has a
	similar role; who would bat an eyelid at an internet community that
	used English despite having no native speakers of the language? If
	there were no native English speakers today the English language
	Wikipedia would still be a very useful project, but would be deemed
	by the current policy to not have a “viable community and
	audience”. I admit that these arguments may seem a little
	far-fetched, but I hope they show that there is a problem with the
	policy as it stands. I believe that by allowing people to share and
	receive knowledge in classical languages as well as modern ones we
	would better fulfil the Wikimedia Foundation's mission statement:
	“The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and
	engage people around the world to collect and develop educational
	content under a free
	license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it
	effectively and globally.”
	


	
	The community draft also specifies
	how much of the interface has to be translated before final approval
	for both first projects in a language and projects in languages that
	already have projects. By requiring the 500 most-used messages to be
	translated for a first project, the policy sets a goal that is tough
	but reasonable. Requiring too many messages to be translated before
	the creation of the project would be likely to tire-out a smaller
	community (which would, of course, grow once the project was
	actually created). Not requiring any would make it easier for
	languages without much real support to slip through the net (I think
	that this part of the process should be used not only to make sure
	that the language has an interface, but also as another part of the
	test to see whether a language is suitable for the project). By
	requiring 500 messages to be translated we can ensure that people
	are serious about the project and have enough motivation, that the
	language (if it is classical) is capable of expressing modern
	concepts and that potential editors are not *too*
	over-worked during what is (let's be honest) the most boring part of
	the process. It is more sensible to require a grater number of
	messages to be translated before the creation of another project in
	a language because a language that already has at least one
	Wikimedia project should have a bigger community. 
	
	Contrary to what one might infer from the length of my argument, the
	community draft actually proposes very few changes from the current
	policy; in fact, it is probably better thought of as a fine-tuning
	of the current policy rather than a completely new one, and I hope
	that other will agree with me that the few changes that the
	community proposes to make to the policy will make it better.