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

[Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)]

Hello Yaroslav,

Before I try to answer your questions, please keep in mind that the
language subcommittee never makes any official public messages; any
comments by subcommittee members, including myself, are personal
comments that don't necessarily reflect subcommittee opinion as a
whole. The 100-article limit noted by GerardM is a personal criteria
and not an official requirement (as listed at <
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy#Requisites
>), though it of course comes up in constructive subcommittee
discussion about each project.

The official policy for the approval of new subdomains is public at <
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy >. This
policy is applied equally to all requests (barring rare exceptional
cases). The subcommittee is specifically entrusted by the board with
developing the policy to ensure that new projects flourish, and to
avoid inactive or problematic projects as we have had in the past. So
far we have had great success, but suggestions are always welcome.

I try my best to make subcommittee decisions as transparent as
possible. I archive all subcommittee discussion to <
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_subcommittees/Languages/Archives
>, although recent messages have not yet been archived because I was
away over December. The policy is also public, and you can track
changes by simply watching the page history. In addition, the page at
< http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages > shows
the status of every current and recently closed request, as well as
the date the status last changed. Further, there are a set of
statistics on test projects at <
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pathoschild/Status >, and
I'll be finishing a public comprehensive analysis tool in the next few
days to replace them. If you have any viable suggestions for more
transparency, feel free to contact me any time.

Members of the language subcommittee are not openly elected. The
original members were approved by the special projects committee, and
additional members where appointed by subcommittee consensus from the
community. I'm not opposed in principle to an election process similar
to stewards (with board appointment), but I'm concerned that might
lead to a subcommittee of members with little or no applicable
expertise or experience, or with a political agenda.

The policy is not applied retroactively, particularly given that
existing projects are outside the subcommittee's scope. However, any
adjustment in the criteria are of course applied to all future
decisions, regardless of when the request was first filed. It would be
difficult to track changes and only enforce the policy in place at the
time each request was filed, and counterproductive to do so since the
adjustments are aimed at improving the sustainability of good projects
and filtering out bad projects.

The language subcommittee's name is a little bit misleading, which
often leads to questions about why we don't also process closures or
make decisions about existing projects. Maybe in the future the
subcommittee will be assigned further responsibilities, but right now
a more correct name would be something like "new language subdomain
subcommittee". We have nothing at all to do with closures (still
processed by community voting) or temporary sysophood (processed by
stewards on < http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions
>).

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact
me or respond here.

-- 
Yours cordially,
Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)