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. 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. 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... 1. We ought to use some external source or sources to determine what we will count as a language for the purposes of creating new projects. 2. Based on those external sources, we ought to have a mechanical rule that generates a default answer. For example, Klingon has a 3 letter ISO 639-2 code, so the default is "accept". "Toki Pona" has no such code, so the default is "reject". (However, I have been convinced by sound argument that the ISO 639 codes are often drawn along political lines rather than real linguistic lines, so a more sophisticated rule is likely needed than in this simple example.) 3. In cases where there is significant community support or opposition to the result given by the "rule" we should use some additional procedure, such as a vote, or better yet a discussion with an eye toward reaching some compromise, followed by a vote. 4. Reasons for overriding the "rule" could range from the rule being wrong to historical precedent. For example, we might decide ultimately to keep 'toki pona' even though in other cases, we would not. While consistency is a value, special cases can be made as a courtesy when a significant community has grown up. ---- 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.) 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