[Wikipedia-l] Creation of nds wikisource

[Heiko Evermann]

I would like to know your opinion about the creation of a Low Saxon 
nds.wikisource.org.

We already have a nds.wikipedia.org (two, to be more precise: 
nds.wikipedia.org and nds-nl.wikipedia.org), and a wiktionary at 
nds.wiktionary.org

We then asked for the creation of nds.wikisource.org at
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Language_domain_requests#Domain_requests_.28nds.wikisource.org.29

Several people from the nds.wikipedia.org voted in favour of this project. I 
then went to http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7855 to formally 
request the creation on November 9th, 2006. Then for some time nothing 
happened. In December several people from the German wikisource objected. It 
was only after that that somebody in bugzilla.wikimedia.org decided to care 
about our request. He concluded that there was no consensus and decided not 
to create this wikisource. 

Some people from de.wikisource.org say that Low Saxon is only a dialect of 
German and that all our texts are welcome in their wikisource. They also want 
us to be included in their project due to a lack of resources.

This now is a peculiar situation: 
* Low Saxon is recognized as regional language: see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German
"Low German has been recognised by the Netherlands and by Germany (since 1999) 
as a regional language according to the European Charter for Regional or 
Minority Languages. Within the official terminology defined in the charter, 
this status would not be available to a dialect of an official language (as 
per article 1 (a)), and hence not to Low German in Germany if it were 
considered a dialect of German. With the ratification of the charter at the 
latest, Germany would appear, therefore, to have at least implicitly adopted 
the stance that Low German is not a dialect of the German language."
* we have a wikipedia
* we have a wikitionary
* we have a wikibooks
* we even have a wikiquote (which we will not use due to German copyright 
problems with collections of quotations)
* but we do not have a wikisource because some people from de.wiktionary.org 
managed to collect a huge number of no-votes.

I think that there should be a Low Saxon wikisource, but due to about 8 no 
votes of people who just want all our content to be included into their 
wikisource just to make theirs bigger and more beautiful, we cannot get one.

What do You think about that?

Kind regards,

Heiko Evermann