[Foundation-l] IYL'08: Moratorium on deleting language projects?

[Andrew Whitworth]

> I agree though that clear and transparent rules must be established for
> the release of the projects from the incubator.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. If we are going to have a moratorium
on closing projects, then we should also have a moratorium on opening
new projects. These should only last until we have developed a such a
clear policy concerning project creations and closings. Such a
moratorium should not last for an entire year.

I think that we create far too many projects, certainly more then we
have the communities to support them. The key word here is
"community". one or two speakers of the language who show some
interest do not constitute a "community".

I propose that small languages should not get differentiated projects.
That is, we should have either:

(a) multilingual per-project incubators (multilingual wikipedia,
multilingual wikibooks, etc) where all small languages would develop
content and communities until such time as they were established
enough to get their own projects, or

(b) have undifferentiated per-language projects for languages that are
too small. That is, for a small language, they would only have a
single project that was wikipedia, wikibooks, wiktionary, etc. As the
project grew and gained community support, it could be differentiated
into separate projects.

By doing either of these things, we prevent creating projects that
have no support, but we are still able to offer support to small
languages.

--Andrew Whitworth