[Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request, and Chinese Wikipedia again

Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest at gmail.com
Tue Feb 22 00:52:17 UTC 2005


On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:05:15 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Repercussions on the other projects"?
> 
> Why should it be up to the community to decide this?

There is a difference between saying that the entire Wikipedia
userbase must approve any new language, and disagreeing with your
suggestion that

> all those who are native speakers of the language and
> are interested in building a Wikipedia in it should be allowed
> to vote. It shouldn't be anybody else's decision if they get a
> Wikipedia in their language or not.

For myself, I don't much buy the argument that approving a related
language/dialect Foo of an existing Wikipedia language Bar will lead a
to a huge drain on the userbase of Bar: Plattsdeutsch or Luxembourgish
have apparently not drawn too many people away from German, etc. 
Furthermore, I agree with you in opposing any idea that general
speakers of Bar should vote on the inclusion of Foo.

However, the question of developer and network administrator resources
seems to me to be important.  Wikimedia is a nonprofit organization
with many goals in its mission, one of which is to promote the
distribution of knowledge in many languages, including minority ones. 
While this is an important goal, I would not want to see the
foundation constrained by explicit policy to spend its resources on
minority languages if it decided that its mission could be better
served another way.

Steve



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