[Foundation-l] Allemanic and Albanian - conditional approval for Gheg

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Before we had a policy on what languages we would accept, it was not
uncommon for people to vote for projects and codes that were manifestly
wrong. As a consequence projects were started that would not be accepted
under the new policy. Some projects like the Siberian were so obvious that
sufficient opposition was generated leading to the ultimate; closure. This
closure was not so much for linguistic reasons but more because of the
violations against Wikipedia principles like NPOV.

When the language committee started, all the existing projects were not what
it should or could consider. There are existing projects that are
problematic for all kinds of reasons. As it is not the remit of the LC, I
have argued on several occasions for a global arbitration committee. I see
this as a place where problems with projects themselves can be addressed. As
it is each language project is independent and decides on its own policies,
we have situations where people find that they are not willing to accept
this independence for all kinds of reasons. Not having a way to channel and
address this is in my opinion bad as it leads to nasty situations.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On Jan 4, 2008 1:50 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 04/01/2008, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I want to propose that the Allemanic Wikipedia is renamed to
> > gsw.wikipedia.org and thereby associate the language with the correct
> > ISO-639 code.
>
> (I am not making any comment on whether or not to rename)
>
> Regarding duplicate-assigned language codes - how did we get to this?
> I was under the impression that all our currently-existing language
> codes were either the correct ISO-639, or given deliberately "invalid"
> codes so as not to conflict with the standard ones.
>
> Given that that is apparently not the case :-) - do we know how many
> other "duplicate" codes are kicking around in our projects, and would
> it be worth looking into renaming these sooner rather later? Any
> rename is tough, but the earlier it's done the less upheaval there is
> for everyone.
>
>
> On a more practical note - if this rename is done, I note there are
> the best part of 3,500 articles on als.wp, and presumably they have a
> proportionate audience. How are we planning to handle the changeover?
> Making 3,500 valid URLs dead links doesn't seem productive; is there
> any way we can put soft redirects into the new als.wp so as to point
> to articles in gsw.wp? There probably won't be *too* much conflict for
> article names, at least not for the forseeable future.
>
> Or a general sitenotice on the new als.wp, in Allemanic, directing
> people to gsw.wp, remaining up for six months or a year? Neither of
> these need to be particularly blatant, and won't impact the new
> project much, whilst still helping those who follow links to als.wp
> looking for Allemanic.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
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