Felix Wan a écrit:
I am very disappointed.
Can someone tell me what is the proper way to have this issue discussed by more people? What is the proper procedure to open a project page in Meta? Should I just open a page and hope that it will survive VfD?
Long time Wikimedians, do not know how frustrating it is for new comers to know how we should do things? We were encourage to be bold, but not told of the real community taboos, not warned that we must respond to messages, or someone may put us on RfC, say that we are incooperative and ban us forever. I spent a lot of time to help one user out of that.
Can the community be more friendly to new comers who may not understand the tricks and have not contributed much yet?
Felix Wan
I can only be sympathetic to your point of view Felix. I have the feeling as well that the wikipedia is less opened than it was before. Some do not open their arms as they would have opened them 2 years ago. There is a resistance much stronger than before. It does not help either that the community is so much bigger, as there is no way that one can keep informed about everything. I think it is much more difficult to keep a common goal all together.
Example : There were no discussions about whether to start a new language or not before. I am reading all the current discussions with interest, and wonder if I should really try to go about african languages. For a single reason, some african languages are not spoken by a lot, or some african languages are spoken by a lot, but very little written, as many people just do not know how to write.
Last comments indicated that making the encyclopedia in many languages was not our goal, but only making the encyclopedia that most people could read. If such was our goal, I think it would be enough to focus on english only, and not care for the few people who do not manage for english (making a rough point here). I am absolutely not supportive of this point of vew. I present the project as one trying to propose information in a language people understand well. The best being the mother language. To my opinion, this is also part of our goal. To make information available as much as possible in people mother language.
Where does it meet your problem ?
Well, because the bigger we become, the more people insist on quality. What was acceptable before, is not acceptable anymore today. When you could work on a 2 000 stubby french wikipedia before, now a 2 000 stubby african language will be questionned. There is resistance to new projects languages, not because it is more bureaucratic, but a lot because people feel they have more to protect. A sort of image of quality carried by the bigger languages, which does not appreciate the stubs in lesser developped languages.
I do not know what to recommand for you to do. You meet the resistance of the new stubby language, you meet the fear of "possible doubts on language duplication", you meet the resistance born from Node insistance. Add the stronger and stronger resistance of a community trying to protect what has already been done. Not easy. I hope there is more friendlyness in the future.