[Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia

Mon May 31 23:17:37 UTC 2004

On May 31, 2004, at 6:26 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> A proclamation
> ...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.

Hm. I have no horse in this race, but isn't the sole determinant of a 
successful wikipedia the number of active contributors?

Regardless of any external language codes (we certainly don't have 
wikis for all the languages under any of the aforementioned schemes), 
it all comes down to an issue of who contributes. If a language had 
*no* official codes or recognition by linguists, but 500 contributors, 
it will probably be more successful than any officially recognized 
language that only has one or two contributors.

By using a "contributor" metric, we can prevent the small vanity (and 
usually dead end) projects, and foster viable projects, regardless of 
their "official" recognition by any given standards body. Of course, 
then we'd have to argue about the number of individuals required to 
start a project, but a contributor metric bypasses the whole "is it a 
real language" issue entirely.

-Bop