[Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia

[Jimmy Wales]

A proclamation

I support the continuation of the Klingon Wikipedia, because it seems
that a (very rough) consensus has been reached.  It's worth noting,
too, that Klingon is a "special case" in many ways in the geek culture
where we all live, and that my own confusing remarks caused it to be
created, and then deleted, causing hurt feelings which are fully my
own fault and much regretted.

In short, this is a unique historical situation that ought not to be
viewed as creating a precedent.  I feel the same way about the sep11
wiki, a project that we likely would not have undertaken or continued
to support, except for a set of unique historical facts about how our
project has evolved.

I'm not really ready to declare an _exact_ policy for future cases,
and it would be inappropriate of me to do so until we have more
consensus building, but I think that we can easily recognize the broad
outlines of a reasonable policy...

1. We ought to use some external source or sources to determine what
we will count as a language for the purposes of creating new projects.

2. Based on those external sources, we ought to have a mechanical
rule that generates a default answer.  For example, Klingon has a 3
letter ISO 639-2 code, so the default is "accept".  "Toki Pona" has no
such code, so the default is "reject".  (However, I have been
convinced by sound argument that the ISO 639 codes are often drawn
along political lines rather than real linguistic lines, so a more
sophisticated rule is likely needed than in this simple example.)

3. In cases where there is significant community support or opposition
to the result given by the "rule" we should use some additional
procedure, such as a vote, or better yet a discussion with an eye
toward reaching some compromise, followed by a vote.

4.  Reasons for overriding the "rule" could range from the rule being
wrong to historical precedent.  For example, we might decide
ultimately to keep 'toki pona' even though in other cases, we would
not.  While consistency is a value, special cases can be made as a
courtesy when a significant community has grown up.

----

I think almost everyone can agree with the outline above, but mostly
because it's an abstract procedure that leaves us with no concrete
guidance.  ;-) I'm good at that.  But I freely admit that the hard
part is settling on a "rule" for the future.

Some things that I think people can agree on about what the rule should
look like:

1.  The rule should not tell us to have separate wikipedias for
British English and Australian English and American English.  (Nor for
"African-American Vernacular English", popularly called "ebonics", nor
for "Southern American English", my own native dialect.)

2.  The rule should provide some means of exclusion for vanity
projects and extremely small (and thus unlikely to be successful)
groups.

3.  The rule should be external to Wikipedia, based on some other
official standards.  The reason for this is that this is only our
default, and the whole purpose of the rule is to give us one less
thing to argue about.  Let some international body make the decision,
and then we follow it unless we do something unusual.

--Jimbo