[Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles

[Mark Williamson]

Two of the biggest remaining problems (of which there are, naturally,
many many many others):

1) Transparency. Maybe some experts fear retaliation - okay, use
pseudonyms or contribute anonymously. Just have someone summarize your
opinion for public archives. Does Gerard fear retaliation? From whom?
Why else does he keep his non-expert opinions hidden?
2) Eurocentrism. Not an accusation to be made lightly, but look at the
geographic composition of the langcom. 9/13 members currently reside
in Europe, another is originally from Europe, 2 from Canada and 1 from
California. Hmm... so the population of Europe is 10% of the Earth's
population, but (nearly) 100% of the population of the LangCom? This
is a huge bias and should not be tolerated within an organization such
as ours which pretends to have an international scope.

-m.

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Let us have a sense of history here. When the language committee started,
> there were no linguists or other experts members on the committee. We were
> really happy when we got someone who is part of the standard bodies that are
> relevant to what we do. It meant that we had a way to assess what the
> likelihood was for requests to the standard bodies. The only problem was
> that for professional reasons it is not possible to publish the point of
> views expressed publicly. As this may affect the employability, this is not
> a trivial matter and confidentiality is the only way got relevant and
> significant contributions.
>
> As a consequence, the mailing list for the language committee became
> confidential. At a later date, some members were not happy with a
> confidential list and wanted to make *their* contributions public. I opposed
> this  because it is not that hard to deduce what someone said by the answers
> from others. As a consequence I keep my contributions private to the members
> of the committee.
>
> At a later date we started to seek expert opinion about the contributions in
> the incubator to ensure that contributions were in the language that goes
> with the ISO-639-3 code. The comments of these experts are in some cases
> best kept private. We seek assurances for ourselves so that we can honestly
> inform the WMF board that in our opinion a project in a new language can
> start.
>
> The policy allows for only one Wikipedia per language and, requests by
> people that seek to force one orthography or one script do not find
> acceptance in the policy and by the committee. At that we deliberately keep
> such deliberations outside of the WMF LC and leave it to the standard bodies
> to define what makes a specific language.
>
> If this gives you the impression that there is not that much to discuss, you
> are completely correct.
> Thanks,
>        GerardM
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