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

[Nathan]

Gerard,

As I've written to you before, I very much respect your work and your
commitment to Wikimedia and its goals. I sometimes find, though, that your
attitude in these discussions is oppositional or defensive and unnecessarily
aggressive. It may be to your benefit to pay particularly close attention
when those with whom you are arguing state that you are incorrectly
interpreting their position.

As to the subject of the thread - I think an element of Gerard's point is
key to understanding the ethos of project approval, now and in the past.
There are actually few mechanical requirements for beginning a new Wikimedia
project - many languages where we don't expect to see an active project
nonetheless have an ISO language code. More important is the presence of a
community of contributors with a demonstrated willingness to maintain a
project, and this seems to be because Wikimedia and the language committee
don't see it as their role to prevent an active community of editors from
working in a project and language of their choice, as long as it can be
shown that there is some potential benefit to such a project. The Egyptian
Arabic project would seem to meet that requirement, and while there are
valid concerns about this type of project (such as those described in the
first post), the "freedom" argument is that we should not prevent such a
group of people from working on a project like this if that is their desire.

Nathan