[Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2009/1/11 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:

> When you talk about reasonable decisions, what is it that makes something
> reasonable? The fact that people like Mohamed consider Egyptian Arabic as
> ignorant makes clear their position, but is that reasonable ? The language
> committee has only a remit to help new languages move along, This was to
> prevent more dysfunctional projects, projects with no new articles, no
> community, projects asked for by people who think Wikipedia is like a stamp
> collection.
>

Do not expect me to answer such the question, as I am not defintely
expert in Arabic language. A don't know if your decission about
Egyptian Wikipedia was right or wrong. I am even not attacing you, as
I am quite sure you are not an expert in this area as well. Hope, you
know, you do not know everything :-) I just reapat again. This is just
a good example of  good question for real expert, which you do not
take into account but simply ignore, which causes problems with
LangComm we discuss now. It is impossible to avoid cultural,
historical and political impact of decision like closing and opening
Egyptian Wikipedia or Bellaruss Wikipedia, so they HAVE TO BE TAKEN
INTO ACCOUNT, even if you do not like it.

If you do not have experts in arabic languages having good knowledge
about cultural and historical issues in current LangComm - try to find
them. I belive there are independent experts for example at arabic
literature departments at good universities in US or UK, which you may
trust, they are not connected with any side of the conflict and which
might help you to avoid doing silly mistakes, by ignoring important
cultural and historical issues. Any language is a result of longer or
shorter social process, this is not just a technical problem.

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html