I. The language itself
The proponents of the project have convinced me that Montenegrin is comparable as a
language standard to Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian. That, by itself, does not justify the
creation of a Montenegrin Wikipedia. Surely it's mutually intelligible with other
varieties, so to that extent you could argue that Montenegrin speakers could contribute
elsewhere (at least if forced, but see points below). That having been said, if we were
starting over now—if we had no projects in Serbo-Croatian at all, or if only the
macrolanguage project currently existed—it would be very hard to justify treating any of
the four differently from each other.
If that were the current situation, I'd probably agree with you not to create
Montenegrin Wikipedia ... or Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian. But if you insisted on creating
the other three, I would require you to create Montenegrin, too.
II. Current facts on the ground
The proponents of the project have convinced me that, at best, it is difficult for
Montenegrins to contribute constructively to the other projects. This is true from the
point of view of both language standards and content. There are many examples both of NPOV
violations on subjects related to the politics of the region and on the use of Montenegrin
linguistic varieties being rejected on the other projects. Based on the usual standards of
project autonomy, it is very difficult for us to force these other communities to give
equal access to the Montenegrin community. (And to some extent, it's probably
reasonable for the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian projects to prefer their own linguistic
standards, even if the NPOV issue itself is still a problem on those projects.)
As far as the macrolanguage project itself, I suppose we could hope to reserve that for
the use of Montenegrin. But we can't really enforce that position on that community,
either. And shwiki is such a mess now that the Montenegrin community would have an easier
time starting over than in fixing it.
The other result of all this is that a lot of Montenegrins simply don't care to
participate; they simply don't want to bother fighting. And that goes toward violating
WMF's goal to give everyone access, as per the next point.
III. Rule 3: "Sufficiently unique" vs. "free and unbiased access"
The long-time position being articulated by members of the committee relies on Point 3 of
the "Requisites for eligibility": "The language must be sufficiently
unique that it could not coexist on a more general wiki." It seems to me, though that
the rest of the point is being ignored: "The committee does not consider political
differences, since the Wikimedia Foundation's goal is to give every single person
free, unbiased access to the sum of all human knowledge, rather than information from the
viewpoint of individual political communities."
The position that "the committee does not consider political differences" is a
fine one when we are starting off on a level playing field. But under the circumstances,
it is my view that it is not viable to ignore political differences in this case. After
all, the current situation is not one where "the viewpoint of individual political
communities" is fully equal. Where we are now, in fact, is that every single
"individual political community"—except the Montenegrin community—has its
viewpoint already entrenched in the system. If we do not consider political differences in
this case, we are, in fact, entrenching the viewpoint of some individual political
communities at the expense of others. And that expressly violates the remit of the
Language Committee.
I suppose that instead of creating Montenegrin Wikipedia, we could try to get the other
projects to give equal access to the Montenegrin community. Good luck enforcing that,
though.
I will argue in point V below that it is more politically neutral to allow Montenegrin
than to reject it.
IV. Committee position on macrolanguages
The committee's current position allows projects in macrolanguages sometimes, but
expresses a clear bias in favor of having projects in individual component languages
rather than in macrolanguages. It is clear that this position is not absolute. Still,
ruling against Montenegrin goes against that trend, rather than for the trend.
V. Language codes, LoC/SIL and LangCom's neutrality
Surely, the main reason we rely on SIL's decisions around language codes is that they
are the official standard-keeper, and we are not. But as part and parcel of that, by
relying on SIL's decisions, we are putting the burden of sorting out linguistic
considerations from political ones on SIL, not on ourselves. Now, we are all aware that
sometimes, at the borders, we might prefer to see things differently from the way SIL
does. That is why there is now a procedure in place for situations where language codes
don't exist. But unquestionably the existence or non-existence of a language code
represents a strong default position on how LangCom should act. Indeed, we normally
require a supermajority to allow projects that don't have ISO 639–3 codes.
In the past, part of the argument against Montenegrin has been "SIL [Ethnologue]
describes it as just another name for Serbo-Croatian". Fine. Then, it was a
politically neutral decision to reject Montenegrin, and would have been a politically
"motivated" position to accept it. Now, the situation is reversed. Now, it is a
politically neutral decision to accept Montenegrin, and a politically
"motivated" position to reject it.
I am fully aware that many of you believe that Montenegrin's winning of a code was a
political, rather than a purely linguistic, victory. There are academics who don't
agree with that, but suppose that it is true. Let that be SIL's problem (or the
Library of Congress's), not ours. When we choose to disagree with SIL, I think we have
to justify that.
Finally, let me add that the Montenegrin community managed to get action not only at SIL,
but actually at LoC first, getting the first change to ISO 639–2 in about five years.
Again, maybe that was a political victory. But personally I don't think we ought to
putting ourselves in a position where we are second-guessing all these experts.
VI. The Incubator test
The rules for allowing a test on Incubator are less stringent than the rules for approving
a project. Accordingly, there has been a test project on Incubator since December. At this
point, it is probably the highest-quality project we have in Incubator now, including the
ones just being approved. There are about 65 editors (33 with over ten edits each) and
1,200 main space pages in the project. Pretty much none of them are the 1–2 sentence
pages we often see on Incubator projects. Of the ten pages I just checked, nine had
references, and the other was a list page. Solely on the basis of whether the community is
working to create a serious encyclopedia project consistent with WMF's goals, I'd
say that this community is very deserving of recognition.
VII. Appearance of neutrality and fairness
Say what you will about the rules, a situation where Montenegrin doesn't get a code
appears profoundly unfair. Superficially, this situation is not much different from
supporters of Ancient Greek complaining that Latin has a project, but they don't,
because the rules changed at a certain point. But the intense political rivalry in the
Balkans makes this a much less trivial case; after all, supporters of Ancient Greek
don't try to interfere with the use of Latin on Latin Wikipedia. This case is simply
one that I don't think we can justify by falling back on the rules. I'd far
rather "bend the rules" in the direction of fairness—particularly because I
don't even think this would be bending the rules. I think the rules can easily be
interpreted to allow Montenegrin, rather than to reject it.
Conclusion
Several people have said to me that Montenegrin is more similar to other Serbo-Croatian
varieties than US and UK English are to each other; would I insist on separate projects if
they happened to have separate language codes? No, I wouldn't. But that's because
on the whole, the various English-speaking communities around the world do manage to
co-exist with each other quite well—and tend to blunt each other's excesses a bit,
too. Sadly, that's not the case here. It is difficult, though not quite impossible, to
justify Montenegrin Wikipedia solely on the grounds of linguistic uniqueness. But based on
every other criterion we are supposed to evaluate, if we were starting over now, we'd
either have only one Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, or we would have separate projects for
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Since we can't stuff the other three back
in the bottle, the right thing to do now is to accept Montenegrin Wikipedia.
Respectfully,
Steven
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