[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Status of Wikimedia

Mon Nov 14 21:56:47 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I'm very sympathetic to all these points.  I don't have an easy answer
>to what to do, and kicking language fanatics off the mailing lists isn't
>exactly our normal style.  I do think we need some serious reform of our
>language policy to end what I see as an ongoing drive to reclassify
>every dialect in the world into a standalone language.  I do think we
>need to be much more severe about closing down unwatched spam traps.
>
>And so on...
>
>Each person's list of things like this will be slightly different, but
>the overall point is that I am beginning to sense a need with the
>community for us to turn inward, to change some of our very open
>policies which lead people to endless new-project proposals and
>new-language speculation.
>  
>
Would it be useful to separate discussion of new projects (incl. 
languages) to a separate mailing list?  It's currently taking a 
disproportionate amount of general mailing list traffic (particularly 
wikipedia-l and foundation-l), so discussion of improving existing 
Wikipedias tends to get lost in the mess.  It's also a frequently 
recurring topic that doesn't seem like it will be going away anytime soon.

Of course, there is a danger that only a self-selecting and 
non-representative group would subscribe to such a mailing list, but 
perhaps that could be ameliorated by notifying wikipedia-l or 
foundation-l when there has been some major debate or an action about to 
take place, ideally with summaries of the discussion posted on meta.  
That way the wider community could participate in a decision without 
being subjected to the more detailed (and constant) discussion of 
languages and dialects.

(I don't pretend this is an ideal solution either, especially since it 
adds to the proliferation of mailing lists, but the benefits seem to me 
to outweight the downsides.)

-Mark