Mostly, it has to do with the action date. I don't think it makes WMF or LangCom look very good to have dozens of projects that appear to have been pending for over five years, especially when the requester is someone who showed up for a day, or a couple of weeks, and then has disappeared. I think it's much better to make sure the requests that are pending are current ones.
My intention, once I get to requests that are no more than a couple of years old, is to allow projects to remain "on hold" for 1–2 years, and only after that closing them. I'm figuring that if no one shows up in two years, we ought to move on.
Finally, I do intend to make clear on such pages that a future request would be welcomed if a community (re-)appears in the future.
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Four more Wikipedia requests dating to the summer of 2010
(Steven White)
2. Final group of projects with requests lingering since 2010
(Steven White)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 14:37:24 +0000
From: Steven White <koala19890(a)hotmail.com>
To: "langcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org" <langcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Four more Wikipedia requests dating to the
summer of 2010
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Having heard no comments on the proposals with respect to Egyptian and Homshetsma over the last seven days, I will close both as rejected, as described in my original message.
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Montenegrin project (Steven White)
2. Four more Wikipedia requests dating to the summer of 2010
(Steven White)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 15:35:23 +0000
From: Steven White <Koala19890(a)hotmail.com>
To: "langcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org" <langcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Montenegrin project
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Amir: Someone has written a response to your email to LangCom at the bottom of the discussion page on Meta.
Gerard: You don't get asked all that often here to spend a lot of time on an involved, complicated decision. If I thought I could easily digest it and feed it to you I would. But I don't. I'm not asking you for a lot of time; rather, the community you serve needs you to spend the appropriate amount of time to see the latest evidence and decide what you think.
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Here are four more requests dating back to 2010 that I'd like to dispose of:
Wikipedia Egyptian (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Egypti…): Propose to reject. SIL marks as an ancient language; it's a predecessor of Coptic. Writing is hieroglyphics. There is no test project underway at Incubator, and the original proposer has not been active in over five years.
Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Nigerian Pidgin (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Nigeri…): Marking as eligible. Ethnologue gives a figure (dating to 2005) of 30 million speakers; though not all are native, it's a widely used pidgin. Ethnologue says there isn't really a written standard, but as of 2016 there is a BBC service in the pidgin, so we can probably steer people in that direction to some extent.
Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Pipil (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Pipil): Marking as eligible. Central American language classified by Glottolog as an Eastern Nahuatl language. Pipil is near extinction, and test project hasn't been all that active recently. But there's a decent amount of content there, and if it's valid content, then this is probably a project that should be encouraged. No objections were noted on the RFL page.
Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Homshetsma (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Homshe…): Propose to reject. See http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/homs1234: Western Armenian dialect not fully intelligible with Armenian. It has no ISO code, and a small number of L1 speakers. The proposal dates to the (northern hemisphere) summer of 2010, and there has been no material discussion there since then. If it ever gets a code, we could revisit; if Western Armenian gets a code, it could possibly be included there.
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Amir: Someone has written a response to your email to LangCom at the bottom of the discussion page on Meta.
Gerard: You don't get asked all that often here to spend a lot of time on an involved, complicated decision. If I thought I could easily digest it and feed it to you I would. But I don't. I'm not asking you for a lot of time; rather, the community you serve needs you to spend the appropriate amount of time to see the latest evidence and decide what you think.
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I want to bring to the committee’s attention that an enormous amount has been written at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Monten…, as well as its talk page. You owe it to the community to review what has been written there. Most (though not all) of what has been written has been about the questions (a) how unique is Montenegrin within the Serbo-Croatian language, and (b) how welcome do Montenegrins feel to participate in the existing projects. Thank you for your active involvement.
Steven
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Hoi,
At the time when the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was created, there was a lot
of blowback because "there is only one Arabic". There is not, it is why
these are considered languages by linguists and not dialects.
In my personal opinion, all the Arabic languages may have their Wikipedia,
they may certainly have recognition in Wikidata.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 13 January 2018 at 22:09, abdelwaheb turki <turkiabdelwaheb(a)hotmail.fr>
wrote:
> Dear Mr.,
> I thank you for your answer. All the Arabic dialects are not supported by
> MediaWiki but Egyptian Arabic (arz), Tunisian Arabic (aeb-arab), Algerian
> Arabic (arq), and Moroccan Arabic (ary).
> Yours Sincerely,
> Houcemeddine Turki
> ------------------------------
> *De :* Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
> *Envoyé :* samedi 13 janvier 2018 13:18:19
> *À :* Discussion list for the Wikidata project.; abdelwaheb turki
> *Objet :* Re: [Wikidata] About the support of Arabic dialects by Wikidata
>
> How many of those are supported by MediaWiki? Can you help find
> translators for the missing ones?
> <https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translatewiki.net_languages>
>
> Federico
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikidata mailing list
> Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
>
>
Dear Language Comittee,
I am Martin Urbanec at Wikipedia and in real-life and Urbanecm at IRC or
Phabricator. I am writing to you regarding Wikivoyage Pashto. Creation of
this project was requested by your fellow clerk StevenJ81 by mistake and it
was very soon to mark that request as approved.
As two other wikis are pending creation and it is much more easier to
create multiple wikis at once rather than one or two I want to know the
following: should the other pending wikis (T183561 and T184374) wait
until T183706 is restored or should they be processed sooner because it
will take some time till LangCom will approve T183706.
Thank you for your time and reply.
Yours sincerely,
Martin Urbanec
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/Urbanecm
Dear colleagues:
I must admit that I have been quite surprised as to how unanimous the committee's opinion has been toward rejecting Montenegrin. At this point, though, with the ISO 639-3 code now fully approved, I think you are in error in failing to acknowledge Montenegrin as "eligible". I may not have a vote here, but I am going to push back on this question.
The committee is basing its position on item #3 of the "Requisites for eligibility": "The language must be sufficiently unique that it could not coexist on a more general wiki. In most cases, this excludes regional dialects and different written forms of the same language." The explanation goes on to give the reason: "The degree of difference required is considered on a case-by-case basis. The committee does not consider political differences, since the Wikimedia Foundation's goal is to give every single person free, unbiased access to the sum of all human knowledge, rather than information from the viewpoint of individual political communities."
It seems to me that there are two reasons for this rule. One is to focus contributor efforts so as to encourage the creation of meaningful projects without a dilution of effort into lots of small, incomplete, less useful, possibly conflicting projects. The second is to try to keep all meaningful projects operating on a politically neutral basis. But I've got news for you: on both grounds, the horse is already out of the barn.
In terms of effort, we already have four wikis running in this language: shwiki, srwiki, hrwiki, bswiki. The effort is already diluted, if you will. But one more is not going to change the dilution factor much—especially given that many of the people who want to contribute to the Montenegrin project are not interested in touching the other projects anyway.
The reason for that is the second point: politics. The current projects already exist, and are already based in "individual political communities", whether you like that or not. So by rejecting Montenegrin, you are forcing people into projects that already operate under the viewpoint of "individual political communities", and (sometimes) hostile ones at that. There is plenty of evidence offered at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Monten… that the other wikis have not been fully open to Montenegrin political points of view. And even linguistically there is a tilt against Montenegrin. Serbian Wikipedia, for example, is only about 5% Ijekavian, about 90% Ekavian, and the rest a hodgepodge. I don't know if the hostility to a more inclusive community was more in the past, or if it is more in the present, or both. But at this point there is a history that many of the Montenegrin language advocates are not willing to touch.
"The committee does not consider political differences[.]" Good luck. It's political whichever way it goes. The only real way for the committee to stay apolitical is to follow ISO 639-3 down the line, at least where languages are "individual" and "living". I don't necessarily think LangCom must do that, but understand that all such deviations from ISO 639-3 are political to some extent. Until now, LangCom could deny Montenegrin by falling back on the SIL/Ethnologue position that Montenegrin was "another name for Serbo-Croatian". Still, starting now, it's a more political act to reject Montenegrin than to accept it. Maybe the Montenegrin community's "win" at the ISO 639 committee was more political than linguistic. Still, that's the ISO committee's problem, not ours. At this point, the formal world standard for languages recognizes Montenegrin as a separate language within the macrolanguage hbs/sh, and we should, too.
Finally, going back to effort: The test wiki, which I opened on December 12 (after the ISO -2 code was published, on the assumption that the ISO -3 code would be automatic), has over 40 contributors and over 350 main space pages. It's the most active test in Incubator right now. We've got a group of people excited about this project and working hard to make it a reality. Why would we want to discourage that?
I think this committee well understands that only 20–50 or so of the existing Wikipedias really serve the core purpose of being encyclopedic resources widely available to a broad community of users. There are others "in between", but most of the rest are small projects that mostly serve local language/culture communities. This project will be no worse that that, and better than many in that regard.
I wouldn't feel this way if there were still a single "Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia". But there's not. So at this point, it's time to move on, and to allow the Montenegrin language community to build its project.
Steven
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Truthfully, I'm not, either. But the "problem", if you will, is that they have five consecutive months of sufficient activity, they've added to the interface translation, and at least a decent fraction of pages have real content. In short, they've done everything we ask according to the rules as written. They feel they've earned this approval. So as things stand now, it feels to them like we're just being arbitrary; they have no idea what they're working toward. And I don't really want to lose them over what looks to be an arbitrary decision on our part.
To this point, I told them that I'd come back to LangCom when there are 200 main space pages, but even at that I don't know if you think that's "enough". For the record, as of today, the smallest Wikivoyage other than Hindi is Ukrainian, with 638 pages. So maybe half of that (~300) is a reasonable target.
Steven
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________________________________
Message: 2
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2018 22:10:08 +0100
From: MF-Warburg <mfwarburg(a)googlemail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee
<langcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Pashto Wikivoyage
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I am not really a fan of that. To me the most important thing is continuous
activity.
2017-12-28 4:02 GMT+01:00 Steven White <Koala19890(a)hotmail.com>:
> MF-W (or anyone else): Can I provide the Pashto Wikivoyage community
> with a target? Remember: there is no "minimum project size" formally stated
> in the policy. And that community has done absolutely everything we have
> asked of it.
>
>
> Steven
>
>
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>
One week has passed, and two members spoke in favor, with one opposed. This project is therefore approved.
Steven
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