To respond to Michael's message of about 9:45 pm last evening (UTC), only one 
project is being held up right now (over this discussion), namely LFN Wikipedia.

Perhaps there should be further discussion on refining requirements around 
conlangs. But for a variety of reasons, I think we need to go ahead and release 
this project and get a phabricator task underway for it. Here is why I say so:


  *   First and foremost at this point, no matter what else anyone might say 
about this, the formal discussion about the approval of this project was open 
for seven days, nobody objected, and I announced the project approved, pending 
language verification, fully according to this committee's rules. Then people 
affirmed language verification, and I announced the project completely 
approved, fully according to this committee's rules. Only then did objections 
begin to appear. And then at that, MF-Warburg acknowledged that he didn't 
really think it would be appropriate to reverse the approval, because the 
approval had been according to this committee's rules. Only Gerard asked to 
walk back the approval, notwithstanding the rules. I'm sorry, but the community 
worked hard to get the project ready, and I was extremely careful in moving the 
nomination through by the book, because I knew that conlangs have been 
controversial in the past. I really gave the committee every chance to respond 
(and object) in a timely fashion. But the broad community of people we serve as 
the Language Committee has a right to believe that we will act according to our 
own rules, and that we will not appear to be capricious or arbitrary about 
doing so. For that reason, regardless of whether or not the committee wants to 
modify the rules on conlangs going forward, I think we need to go ahead and 
release this project as approved.


  *   Second, I can tell you that there is no other conlang project even close 
to approvable now by current standards, so there is time to discuss conlangs 
further before this question would come up again. Consider the following data 
(available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:StevenJ81/sandbox/Conlang):


There are 21 conlangs with language codes. Of those, seven (7) already have 
full Wikipedias, and another five (5) are art languages (like Klingon, Quenya 
and Sindarin). That means that exactly nine (9) other conlangs can even 
possibly be discussed right now under the current standards. One is LFN. One is 
Kotava, which has about 100 pages in Incubator, but fewer than 100 speakers. 
Two others have one page each, and the other five have no content at all. So 
besides LFN, no other project can possibly come up for discussion in the near 
future under the current standards.


On my data page, the only two other conlangs having no language code but at 
least 200 speakers (making them as large as Ido, third-largest conlang with a 
Wikipedia) are Toki Pona and Interslavic. Toki Pona does have an SIL 
application pending now, and if it is approved, we could potentiallly have to 
deal with that in the next year or so. But Interslavic does not have an 
application. Any change we may discuss may want to keep Toki Pona in mind.

Steven

PS: Two other projects are also waiting now for language verification: 
Wikipedias in Gorontalo and Ingush. I think Milos has been trying to get in 
touch with the language experts that have been identified in those cases.




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