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

[Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)]

Yaroslav,

The policy is written at <
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy >. There
are sometimes particular considerations for exceptional projects, but
the policy requirements are applied universally.

Yes, there is a serious problem right now with processing times. A
significant cause of this is the need for subcommittee members to
manually check each project, which is time-consuming even with the
current analysis script. I'm almost finished work on a new analysis
script that provides much more comprehensive information (thus
requiring less manual work), and can be used by anyone. Both of these
improvements should dramatically decrease the workload and improve
processing time.

We did try recruiting new members a few months ago, but they quickly
became inactive. One of the new members admitted feeling overwhelmed
and intimidated by the workload and the extent and complexity of
discussion; I'm hoping the technical changes I've been working on will
reduce and simplify some of the work, and encourage the inactive
members to participate more. Editors are welcome to help us manage
requests for new languages without necessarily joining the
subcommittee; for example, one editor was very helpful in notifying us
of batches of projects ready to be approved at one point.

The management of existing projects would add significantly to the
workload, which as I've mentioned above is not yet feasible. I think
it will be in the future, once the new technical measures are in
place, more members are active, and requests for new languages are
further streamlined. Regardless, we cannot expand our scope without
board approval, and I don't think we're ready to do that yet.

-- 
Yours cordially,
Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)