[Foundation-l] Allow new wikis in extinct languages?

Wed Apr 2 18:24:40 UTC 2008

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 2:07 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Pharos <pharosofalexandria at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  I've proposed the "Can
>  >  someone write an FA on the language's modern literature?" criterion as
>  >  a useful surrogate for the types of criteria you suggest.
>
>  But just saying that a person "can" do something doesn't mean that the
>  person "will" do it. Volunteers work on what they want to work on, and
>  if nobody wants to write a particular article or class of article, it
>  will never get written.
>
>  Through Wikipedia policy, if the article exists then the topic must be
>  notable. However if the article doesn't exist, that doesnt mean that
>  the topic is non-notable. What this is, is a test with potential false
>  negatives.

What I'm saying is, we have to allow an outlet for people proposing a
new language Wikipedia in a "historical" language to prove their case.
 Right now, the subcommittee tells them, "Don't bother me kid, go to
the International Organization for Standardization", which is an
impossible task, because the ISO is a big bureaucracy that just
doesn't deal with categorizing "historical" languages that are still
alive in a written form.

Writing an FA would not be easy, but it is a task that the proposers
of a new language Wikipedia in a "historical" language could be
reasonably expected to be able to accomplish to prove their case (or
not).  The time-scale for writing an FA would typically be a few
months, which is quite comparable to the time-scale of the -vastly
unproductive- back-and-forth arguments that characterize a typical
request to the subcommittee of this type.

Thanks,
Pharos