Tim Starling wrote:
People underestimate the cost involved in setting up a
wiki.
Once again I'd like to point out that having a language-specific Wikipedia is
not usually the best way to organize, promote, or develop a language.
It's probably much better for a group of interested people working on a small or
endangered language to set up a general-purpose wiki that encompasses the
Wikimedia ideas of a Wikipedia, Wiktionary, a language-learning Wikibook, and
perhaps a few other community- or discussion-oriented purposes.
There are a _lot_ of free or low-cost PHP hosting services that can host a wiki.
Mediawiki can be hard to set up on these services, since MySQL usually costs
significantly more, but there are a number of other wiki engines* that work with
flat files and don't require a database.
Anyways: I think the best strategy is to tell people who want to have a
Wikipedia in their language to go start a wiki somewhere else. If they can show
that they have a robust community that can support a Wikipedia, then they should
get an
xx.wikipedia.org domain (as well as other
xx.wikisomething.org stuff).
~ESP
* I can hear it now: "Huh? There are other wiki engines? There are other wikis?
I can set up my own? Huh?"