[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

Sat Dec 29 19:20:15 UTC 2007

Hoi,
It is and has always been accepted practice that a constructed language can
apply for a Wikimedia Foundation project. In order to be given a conditional
approval the language requires an ISO-639-3 code. With this approval it may
demonstrate the linguistic validity by writing in the Incubator. With the
localisation done and with a sufficient corpus final approval will be given
by the Language committee. This corpus needs to be sufficient for us to ask
someone to analyse the text and identify it for the language it is.

At the moment people supporting the Kotava language are working on the
localisation for their language. They are awaiting the moment when they
receive their ISO-639-3 code. This is likely to happen end of January 2008.
The localisation will help them in any MediaWiki installation inside or
outside the WMF.

The point of this all; it does not take a native speaker to start a project
for a constructed language. What I have pointed out in the Language
Committee for a long time now, is that it will take *more *effort to
convince us that a constructed language deserves a WMF project. In this I
often find that Incubator articles often do not provide the linguistic
information that allows us to assess it properly (this is just to indicate
that we do need convincing before we approve new languages).

Thanks.
    GerardM

On Dec 29, 2007 7:56 PM, Matthew Britton <matthew.britton at btinternet.com>
wrote:

> Milos Rancic wrote:
> > - "if not millions" is also a poetic nonsense. Please, read some
> > statistics [2] before expressing such bold "facts".
>
> The English Wikipedia has more than six million registered user
> accounts. About 50 editions of Wikipedia have more than 1000 registered
> user accounts. Content has thus been added by thousands of users in
> about 50 cases, and millions in at least one case. In what way does this
> constitute "poetic nonsense"?
>
> > Also, you are telling me that only cultures with "millions of
> > speakers" deserves to have good source of informations?
>
> Not at all. One native speaker who has no knowledge of any other
> language would be enough reason to start a project in that language.
>
> -Gurch
>
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