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

[Nathan]

As you're aware better than I am, I'm sure, we have no effective way to
ensure at any point that most communities share the core principles of
Wikimedia. Those most invested in designing these principles simply don't
represent ability in enough languages, and even the diversity that do we
have is limited by the relatively small number of people involved in
multiple projects and Foundation issues at the same time. Case in point is
the Russian Wikibooks from not long ago, or any of a number of complaints
lodged at the metapub which seem to demonstrate a disconnect between some
projects and core Wikimedia values.

Since our ability to measure and police such things as adherence to core
values is so limited, and obviously controversial, the lang com has I think
reasonably restricted itself to other considerations - notably:

1) is there an active community, sufficient to give the project a good
chance of long term progress
2) has the community demonstrated its ability to manage and maintain a
project in its language
3) is there a sufficient audience for the language such that the project may
conceivably contribute to the core goal of Wikimedia by reaching a
significant segment of humanity

(describing these restrictions based on my reading of Gerard and Pathoschild
on this list over the last year, as opposed to the direct wording of the
policy or actual practice of which I have little experience)

There are obviously other considerations that could be applied, as
demonstrated by Alsebaey and Aphaia, but the language committee doesn't seem
to have the expertise or the mandate to make decisions based on such
criteria. The Board may, but it seems like they have avoided becoming
involved at that level. Again, probably reasonable from their perspective.
There seems to be no perfectly suited forum for treating these potential
objections that are outside the remit of the lang com - many have noted that
it could be the role of a Wikimedia Council, but I personally haven't seen a
proposal for such a thing that I could support.

Nathan

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:

> While I am not so much worried to see a Wikimedia project helping a
> minority language promotion. I rather am concerned about political
> view promotion using a Wikimedia project.
>
> In the discussion of  Masry Wikipedia, I saw one of the proposers
> complain the current Arabic Wikipedia uses the ugly language the
> normal Egyptian cannot bear, ant another Arabic editor pointed out his
> claim meant that arwiki community had refused to move [[Muhammad
> Ibn-Abdullah]] to [[The Prophet (May piece be upon him)]] (or
> precisely its equivalent in Arabic).
>
> I am worry about that unestablished editors who don't share our core
> principles are let start their Wikipedia whose content may not be
> understood by anyone else and thus not noticed and corrected their
> systematic biases.
>
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:11 AM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > Muhammad Alsebaey wrote:
> >> However, let me
> >> stress again my point, is it the WMF place to take a stand as to
> accelerate
> >> such an adoption of the spoken language as written? I dont think so.
> > This seems to be the point on which the language committee, as currently
> > constituted, disagrees. I fear it is somewhat run by
> > minority-language-promotion advocates, who are most interested in using
> > Wikimedia to push their pet ideas about how language and society ought
> > to work, shared by few other people.
> >
> > -Mark
> >
> >
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>
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