[Foundation-l] language proposal policy. let's continue the work

Sat Jul 19 08:21:43 UTC 2008

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 5:52 PM, Crazy Lover
<always_yours.forever at yahoo.com> wrote:
> visit our proposal page
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy/Community_draft
> the baselines are definied. please help us to refine them.

Why, if I don't agree with the baselines, would I help you refining them?

My objections:
* I _still_ am not convinced that translating the interface should be
necessary for a project to go on
* It seems that criteriums 2 (ISO 639) and 3 (no language variations)
would better be combined - ISO 639 codes are in general not given to
language variants, so having it as a separate requirement seems
overkill.
- criterium: should have an existing body of written language
- criterium: should be sufficient distinct from existing languages
Followed by: As a default, we consider a language to have these two
properties if and only if it has an ISO 639 code. Exceptions in either
direction can be made if there are particularly good arguments.

As for refining the points: At point 4 I would like to add that the
audience should not only be people who are able to use that language,
but also people who would want to use it - as an example, millions of
people would be able to read an "English written backward" Wikipedia,
but none or almost none would prefer it to the existing English one
(of course English written backward falls short of criteriums 2 and 3)

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com