Two of the biggest remaining problems (of which there are, naturally, many many many others):
1) Transparency. Maybe some experts fear retaliation - okay, use pseudonyms or contribute anonymously. Just have someone summarize your opinion for public archives. Does Gerard fear retaliation? From whom? Why else does he keep his non-expert opinions hidden? 2) Eurocentrism. Not an accusation to be made lightly, but look at the geographic composition of the langcom. 9/13 members currently reside in Europe, another is originally from Europe, 2 from Canada and 1 from California. Hmm... so the population of Europe is 10% of the Earth's population, but (nearly) 100% of the population of the LangCom? This is a huge bias and should not be tolerated within an organization such as ours which pretends to have an international scope. -m. On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hoi, > Let us have a sense of history here. When the language committee started, > there were no linguists or other experts members on the committee. We were > really happy when we got someone who is part of the standard bodies that are > relevant to what we do. It meant that we had a way to assess what the > likelihood was for requests to the standard bodies. The only problem was > that for professional reasons it is not possible to publish the point of > views expressed publicly. As this may affect the employability, this is not > a trivial matter and confidentiality is the only way got relevant and > significant contributions. > > As a consequence, the mailing list for the language committee became > confidential. At a later date, some members were not happy with a > confidential list and wanted to make *their* contributions public. I opposed > this because it is not that hard to deduce what someone said by the answers > from others. As a consequence I keep my contributions private to the members > of the committee. > > At a later date we started to seek expert opinion about the contributions in > the incubator to ensure that contributions were in the language that goes > with the ISO-639-3 code. The comments of these experts are in some cases > best kept private. We seek assurances for ourselves so that we can honestly > inform the WMF board that in our opinion a project in a new language can > start. > > The policy allows for only one Wikipedia per language and, requests by > people that seek to force one orthography or one script do not find > acceptance in the policy and by the committee. At that we deliberately keep > such deliberations outside of the WMF LC and leave it to the standard bodies > to define what makes a specific language. > > If this gives you the impression that there is not that much to discuss, you > are completely correct. > Thanks, > GerardM > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l