Hoi,
These argument has been dealt with in the last week and Steven threatened
to make this post because he did not get his way. He has been a asked a
question by one of the other members of the committee that he did not
answer. As far as I am concerned there is no room for forum shopping, this
post was known by him to be seen as problematic. It is. It only solidifies
the shared opinion that there will be no project in Montenegrin.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 6 March 2018 at 00:28, Steven White <Koala19890(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
*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
Sent from Outlook <http://aka.ms/weboutlook>
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