[Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia

Tue Jun 1 20:48:52 UTC 2004

Lainaus Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>:

> A proclamation
> 
> I support the continuation of the Klingon Wikipedia, because it seems
> that a (very rough) consensus has been reached.  It's worth noting,
> too, that Klingon is a "special case" in many ways in the geek culture
> where we all live, and that my own confusing remarks caused it to be
> created, and then deleted, causing hurt feelings which are fully my
> own fault and much regretted.

Ahhah. 

> In short, this is a unique historical situation that ought not to be
> viewed as creating a precedent.  I feel the same way about the sep11
> wiki, a project that we likely would not have undertaken or continued
> to support, except for a set of unique historical facts about how our
> project has evolved.

Yeah. Sure; absolutely true.

> I'm not really ready to declare an _exact_ policy for future cases,
> and it would be inappropriate of me to do so until we have more
> consensus building, but I think that we can easily recognize the broad
> outlines of a reasonable policy...

Snipping here, because all of it has been designed to be non-controversial,
and indeed has been nicely constructed with that view.

...

...

...

> ----
> 
> I think almost everyone can agree with the outline above, but mostly
> because it's an abstract procedure that leaves us with no concrete
> guidance.  ;-) I'm good at that.  But I freely admit that the hard
> part is settling on a "rule" for the future.
> 
> Some things that I think people can agree on about what the rule should
> look like:
> 
> 1.  The rule should not tell us to have separate wikipedias for
> British English and Australian English and American English.  (Nor for
> "African-American Vernacular English", popularly called "ebonics", nor
> for "Southern American English", my own native dialect.)

Actually (and this is just about my only objection) you seem to be falling
into the same mistake here that was perpetrated with clumping Toki Pona, 
Esperanto and Klingon with a bunch of other languages; except you are doing
it with a view to exclusion, rather than inclusion.

It is a singularly unhelpful approach to decide beforehand which languages
you want a universal rule to "justify" and which to "condemn"; and then to
_design_ a "universal" rule that would produce the wanted result.

To prove that I am not making a purely idle procedural point; consider
the grouping of "ebonics" here with the other varieties of speech.

As far as I understand it, Ebonics is motivated by a genuine political
desire towards recognition (even if not separatism). It therefore may well
have the "legs" to keep it going till eventual _actual_ separation from the
English Language occurs. This is supported by the fact that the people at
the center of the process have actually been _describing_ actual differences
of grammar between this "vernacular" and "English proper".

To take a strong stance against including a "Ebonics" wikipedia, when we
really have a poor view of its future evolution, is in my opinion counter-
productive. 

To try to gerrymander a "universal rule" which would keep it out, would
(frankly) be ludicrous.

> 2.  The rule should provide some means of exclusion for vanity
> projects and extremely small (and thus unlikely to be successful)
> groups.
> 
> 3.  The rule should be external to Wikipedia, based on some other
> official standards.  The reason for this is that this is only our
> default, and the whole purpose of the rule is to give us one less
> thing to argue about.  Let some international body make the decision,
> and then we follow it unless we do something unusual.
> 
> --Jimbo