We should start finishing this issue. May all of you check the previous discussion and say if you agree in general with the proposal amended by MF-Warburg? If so, I would make the next draft.
On Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 12:52 PM, Milos Rancic <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 6:19 PM, MF-Warburg <[email protected]> wrote: >>> 1.2) Clear-cut situations for making a language eligible for Wikimedia >>> projects: the language has a valid ISO 639-3 code, there are no >>> significant issues in relation to the language itself, the population >>> of speakers is significant, request made by a native speaker. In this >>> case, any committee member can mark language / project eligible. >> >> This is already what we are doing. But if such a case should turn out to be >> contentious, we would discuss it even after someone marked it as eligible >> without discussion. At least that would have been my expectation. So if we >> want to make such a detailed policy, could we please add that as well? > > Agreed. > >>> 1.3) Approval without obvious formal requirements. No project will be >>> approved without them. >> >> What does this mean exactly? > > Yes, it could be described more in detail. I thought that we can't > vote about approving a new Wikipedia if they didn't translate 500 > MediaWiki messages and similar. I was too lazy to take a look into the > exact conditions for approval. In other words, we could discuss about > the activity, but we can't discuss to approve the project if it's not > written in particular language. And similar. > >> Ok, this is our current issue with Lingua Franca Nova and Ancient Greek. >> Shouldn't we better discuss about the underlying policy regarding >> constructed and ancient languages? A general rule seems better than the >> possibility to allow everything by a majority vote. > > Yes. But it would anyway require majority vote. What's the difference > between Ancient Greek and Sumerian? Would we allow Wikipedia in > Sumerian? Classical Hebrew? ... > >>> 2.2) Eligibility of a language without a valid ISO 639-3 code, but >>> valid BCP 47 code. (Note: this covers Ecuadorian Quechua.) >> >> I don't recall that we ever discussed allowing projects with BCP47 codes. >> Again, isn't this something that should be discussed as a policy? > > In general, we should discuss and (hopefully) approve usage BCP 47 > formally, as well. However, it is so wide territory, that it's hard to > make a consistent rule about it: Why should we approve qu-ec and why > we shouldn't approve en-au? Why it's better to use mn-mong for > Mongolian instead of mvf? ... > >> The combination of 3.1 and 4.1 would be bad insofar as it allows a 2/3 >> majority to introduce a new member anyway. > > Yes. But that would mean that there is something really bad going on here. > >> Yes, Langcom works with the principle that a proposal is approved unless a >> member is against it, in which case the proposal dies (it is not exactly >> rejected, n'est-ce pas?). >> At times I have been quite annoyed by it as well. I think however that in >> general it works quite well. Over the course of the years in which I have >> been a langcom member now, I sometimes thought about whether the >> “governance“ could be improved. But my personal conclusion always was: not >> really. It wouldn't harm to formalize a rule for getting rid of a >> theoretical trollish member opposing everything without a reason. But apart >> from that? I'm not really sure that introducing majority voting will help >> much. > > Time and efforts required for arguing with only one person and having > in mind that it's useless makes LangCom dysfunctional. Besides that, > in few years we could have even 100 requests for eligibility per year. > It's likely that 60-70 would be valid, but it's also likely that we > would have to spend extraordinary time on discussion about 10-20 of > them. Even if it's once per month, it would be stressful enough and > lead us into the new period of hibernation. > > Besides that, it's not about random persons here, but about people > with enough professional and personal integrity. It is normal that we > don't agree about everything and that we should accept if more members > of LangCom decided to approve the project. _______________________________________________ Langcom mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
