[Foundation-l] Wikinews in many languages

Mon Dec 6 12:05:10 UTC 2004

>Hi,>now that we're about to move demo.wikinews.org to en.wikinews.org, we have  >to think about a procedure for setting up other language domains. If any  >decision on this matter has already been made by the Board, please let me  >know.

Not that I know.
I would like that we three have time to discuss this before decisions are taken please.

>It should be noted that on two of the language voting pages, no majority  >was reached on starting the project. These are French and Chinese. Others  >had very small participation.>In the original proposal, I suggested that Wikinews can be set up in any  >accepted Wikimedia project language where there is at least one interested  >participant, and that 4 more regulars are required for the language to be  >recognized as "official", and for the firsts sysops to be created.

I do think that "not recognising something official" even though it exists is nice
but totally irrealistic. As soon as wikinews exists, then we could always try to pretend it only 
is "okay" in one language, but not okay or not part of wikimedia in another language, that would be 
just ink on paper. For editors and mostly for readers, it will be there. 

So, instead of pretending it is not recognised, we could 1) have a temporary adress of the type fr.demo.wikinews.org 
and 2) have a temporary logo rather than the official and 3) put a warning on top of it.

I would like to ask the Board if this procedure is acceptable.If it is not, one possible >alternative would be to immediately set up  language domains for any language where there >are more than 10 votes on  the respective voting page on Meta, and more than 50% in favor. >This would  currently mean Japanese and German. The vote could be re-opened, and kept  >open permanently.

I am opposed to this. There is little sense to set up a language just based on editors in this language supporting the global project. What should lead the creation of a language subdomain is presence of editors, not support at a global poll. If some people are interested, let's open the domain, if not, we do not need to let an empty wiki prey of vandals.

I also think that the vote was meant to be global, not to decide which language would be created versus which languages would not be.

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