My main point is that no matter who gets to decide, it should NOT be
the general community. I personally think it should be the community
that uses that language, but obviously if the board does not like it
they have ultimate veto power.
Also, while individual Wikipedias DO take up developer resources, I
would severely question any argument to halt all creation of new
Wikipedias based on that alone - an individual Wikipedia, especially
if it's not a success, does not cost the foundation a significant
amount of money. If it did, all inactive Wikipedias would've been
outright deleted by now because they would be a waste of valuable
resources, but given that they don't take up anybody's time and money
right now but a lot of mine and a little of Angela's (at least to my
knowledge), they have all been left intact and the sole locked
inactive Wikipedia, the Bashkir Wikipedia, was unlocked recently.
Given that we have an existing Wikipedia in Englisc/Anglo-Saxon, one
in Gothic, one in Klingon, one in Lojban, and the like, I find it
extremely strange that anybody thinks we should bar the existance of a
new Wikipedia in a living, natural language who has at least some
native speakers who want a Wikipedia.
Mark
On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 19:52:17 -0500, Stephen Forrest
<stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:05:15 -0700, Mark Williamson
<node.ue(a)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