Ewen Caroline wrote:
If we (luxembourgish wiki, around 10 regulars so far, working on it :) had to go that way to get our own wiki, I'm sure we wouldn't have gotten it, since noone would have found us etc. Now at least we have a chance to create something original in our language (for those who aren't that familiar with lux, we're only about 250.000 native speakers :)).
There would be no question about setting up a wikipedia when there are 250,000 native speakers. There would be no question, in fact, for much smaller language communities than that.
Node tends to engage in invalid FUD. It's a very different thing to contemplate a population of 250,000 native speakers who actually use a language, versus an academic exercise.
The question is more about dead languages and conlangs which are spoken only by very small numbers of people, and especially when those speakers primarily from the perspective of language preservation, academic interest, or just as a fun subculture. For those types of communities, it is certainly in line with our educational mission to assist them, but it is fairly clear to me that setting up an encyclopedia project is not likely to be the best way to help.
It is my opinion that we should revisit some of our existing wikipedia projects for which no community has developed or seems likely to develop, and see if we might not better serve those communities (and the goals of Wikimedia more broadly) by encouraging wikibooks and wiktionaries first.
--Jimbo