I'm glad you mentioned this one. There are any number of requests, and/or test
projects in Incubator, hoping to create new projects in languages where projects already
exist, but in a different script. As just a couple of examples:
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Southe…
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Romani…
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Sindhi (which
is for Sindhi in Devanagari, rather than Perso-Arabic)
My best understanding here is that there are a bunch of tradeoffs going on in all of these
cases:
* By default, I know we'd prefer for such things to be incorporated into existing
projects when possible. But "when possible" is full of challenges:
* Best approach is to use script converters, of course.
* Sometimes script converters are not possible or practical. In such cases, you can
have multiple pages in different scripts within a single project. That's what we do in
Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Wikipedia; see, for example, our articles on
Astronomy<https://lad.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomiya>ya>.
* Sometimes, though, it seems communities are unwilling to allow this. The late,
unlamented "Moldovan" projects are one example; in theory, the Romanian
community could have allowed Cyrillic pages, but refused. But even assuming that's
not a good example, there are other cases where communities don't want to allow such a
thing, and I don't know when those objections are practically motivated and when they
are culturally/politically motivated. (I'm not sure about the Sindhi project, for
example.)
* I also don't know at what point things become worthwhile trying. Wikipedia in
Pinyin-romanized
Mandarin<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wiki…
potentially makes sense to me (provided that it's not better to incorporate it into
zhwiki). Wikipedia in Chinese-ideograph English (or Cyrillic English) makes no sense to me
whatsoever.
Any guidance/discussion would be very useful.
Steven
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