On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 6:53 AM, Milos Rancic <mill...@gmail.com> wrote: > I realized that at Requests for new languages [1] we have a number of > proposals for projects in moribund languages [2]. In brief, when > roughly less than 1000 dominantly older persons speak one language, > this language will be dead when those speakers die. Even some larger > languages [than mentioned ones], like Lower Sorbian [3] is (with > ~15.000 of speakers) are deeply endangered and it is almost > predictable that this language won't be alive in the next century. > But, cases like Lower Sorbian one is -- are border cases -- and I > don't see a problem with creating such project inside of the standard > procedure. > > However, we have some number of cases where project is requested for a > language with less than 100 older speakers. > > My proposal is to do the next in the cases of moribund languages: > * Reject proposal for project creation. > * Suggesting them to put their language corpus at [multilingual] Wikisource. > * Allowing them to work on Incubator if they really want to spend some > efforts on language revival. > * If a project at Incubator shows possibilities to be a live one, they > may ask for project again, when they will have to pass all necessary > steps (localization of MediaWiki and so on). > > This is a kind of a "political issue", so I prefer to see discussion > here before discussion at Language subcommittee. > > [1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages > [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death > [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Sorbian
As far as I know, _all_ new languages are supposed to show their possibility at the incubator nowadays, which to me means that there is no need for a separate policy on these languages. My proposal would be: * Give a warning to the proposer that the language edition is likely to fail * Maybe be a bit stricter before allowing the language out of the incubator (larger languages might get away with a bit lower requirements because there is some 'expected future activity' to compensate) -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l