[Foundation-l] On Arabic and sub-language proposals.

[Mary Murrell]

I think there is a downside in that a local national "dialect" wikipedia in a country as important as Egypt takes energy away from the main Arabic wikipedia, which has global range and an important role to play worldwide. Wikipedias, after all, are written rather than spoken entities.

--- On Sun, 10/5/08, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
From: Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] On Arabic and sub-language proposals.
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Sunday, October 5, 2008, 11:01 AM

 Is there any 
downside at all for an individual who asks for a new language of 
Wikipedia to be started, after that version fails?  We don't 
really have a list of people who started failed projects.  If I 
don't propose a Lebanese Wikipedia, my neighbor might do so.  If 
it fails, the Wikimedia Foundation will be more ridiculed over its 
inflated number of 250 languages, but my neighbor doesn't suffer.