[Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I am not the only one that keep my contributions confidential. There is
another member of the LC who has good personal reasons to have the
contributions not publicly available. The reason is that there may be
repercussions in the professional sphere. When this was discussed in the
past, I was and I still am of the opinion that because of this it would be
best to have a confidential list.

Some members were of the opinion that this was not what they wanted for
their contributions, they decided to disregard the agreed need for
confidentiality and opt out. It just so happens that I am the most prolific
member of the list.

As to the reason for the language committee, at the time there was a growing
backlash against the growing list of Wikipedias. They were effectively dead
and many still are moribund. They were created using the premisse "if we
create it, they will come". As a result we have Wikipedias where the
language will not be recognised by people who *know* the language as being
properly written in that language. They are written by people who have a
1923 dictionary while others have a 19th century grammar book..

The backlash had the potential of stopping all new Wikipedias in any
language. To prevent this from happening, the language committee and its
policy were created. This policy was accepted by the board of trustees. With
the flow of new Wikipedias now down to a trickle, the new Wikipedias prove
that the policy functions. We do not have people clamouring for the end of
new projects.

The language policy requires a certain level of localisation before it
considers any new project. A new language requires that the "most used"
messages (some 500 messages) are localised. Subsequent projects currently
require the full localisation of MediaWiki core and the localisation of the
messages that belong to the extensions used by the Wikimedia Foundation.
These requirements have had a profound beneficial effect on the usability
for these languages. There are people who bemoan the fact that the
requirement for subsequent projects is tough, the rationale is that
localisation of MediaWiki requires continuous effort. This effort is
supported by the LocalisationUpdate extension that I asked a friend of mine
to develop. LocalisationUpdate ensures that new localisations coming into
SVN will go live within 24 hours.

In conclusion, yes there is confidentiality, the reason for this is
understood within the committee. The language policy does what it is
designed to do. We actively support languages and have been instrumental in
getting languages registered in the ISO-639-3 standard. The language
committee is not a talking shop, we implement an agreed policy.
Thanks,
      GerardM



On 26 August 2010 00:41, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 25 August 2010 23:34, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
>
> > Gerard Meijssen keeps his contributions to
> > the discussions secret
>
>
> Is this true? If so, what is the rationale? Described like that, that
> sounds ridiculous and unacceptable.
>
>
> - d.
>
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