Language committee/Archives/2008-03

For a summary of discussions, see the archives index.

Spanned discussions

The following discussions span multiple months and are archived in the first applicable archive:

Wikipedia Sranan Tongo (February 2008).

Occitan ISO 639-3 change

GerardM noted a change in the ISO 639-3 classification of Occitan.

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
09 March 2008 09:51

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Wikipedia Drents, Wikispecies Macedonian, Wikisource Middle Dutch

Several requests were rejected: Wikipedia Drents, Wikispecies Macedonian, Wikisource Middle Dutch.

Shanel Kalicharan (Shanel)
10 March 2008 02:21

Hello all,
I propose the rejection of the following requests:
==Wikipedia Drents==
There is only one interested user, who, from the comments on the request page, appears to be making things up on the test project. More importantly, Drents is already accepted on the nds-nl wiki, so there is no need for a new project
==Wikispecies Macedonian==
Wikispecies is already a multilingual project.
==Wikisource Middle Dutch==
Texts in Middle Dutch can go on the Dutch Wikisource.
—
10 March 2008 17:00

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Shanel Kalicharan (Shanel)
13 March 2008 00:05

— wrote:

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Well the nds-nl wikipedia was created before langcom existed, IIRC. I think the best thing to do for now would be for any interested contributors to continue working on Drents articles on nds-nl wiki.until there's enough people around to form a community for a separate project.

— wrote:

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We encourage people to place texts in historic languages onto an existing Wikisource if possible. This was done for the recently-rejected Ancient Greek request. Since a separate Wikisource in a historic language would have finite growth, it would quickly turn into a vandal/spam magnet, as was the case with the Old English Wikisource (if I remember correctly). It's just more practical to lump in any texts in that language onto a modern-language equivalent Wikisource, or put them on Oldwikisource.
Shanel Kalicharan (Shanel)
15 April 2008 12:14

*poke*
If there's no objections, I'll go ahead and close these requests.
Shanel Kalicharan (Shanel)
27 May 2008 02:57

All rejected.
Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
27 May 2008 02:58

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Wikinews Czech

The request for a Czech Wikinews was approved.

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
10 March 2008 02:30

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Wikipedia Mari, Wikipedia Ruhrdeutsch, Wikipedia Silesian, bulk creation of requests by non-users

The request for a Silesian Wikipedia was approved; the second request for a Mari Wikipedia was verified as eligible; the request for a Ruhrdeutsch Wikipedia was rejected. Several requests were deleted as invalid.

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
27 March 2008 11:24

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Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
27 March 2008 17:22

I assume you mean you marked Mari as eligible; at least, that's what you actually did. :)
With regards to Silesian, ISO 639-3 says it's a language. We should avoid the dispute entirely by going with our usual accept-what-ISO639-says stance.
With regards to Max Sonnelid, has anyone contacted him to politely discuss this? I've previously closed batch requests by non-speakers, so I'll talk to him if nobody has.
Jon Harald Søby
27 March 2008 17:29

With regards to Max Sonnelid, has anyone contacted him to politely discuss this? I've previously closed batch requests by non-speakers, so I'll talk to him if nobody has.

I have a few times, but he doesn't take a hint. On Betawiki he is also requesting new languages all the time, but Siebrand keeps rejecting it since he's not a native speaker. He's been doing a lot of translations on Southern Sami, but someone who knows the language better says it's only dictionary word-for-word stuff. Also, I've seen his translations into Swedish, and they're not very good. He's a very energetic little fellow, but unfortunately not as constructive as he could have been.
Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
27 March 2008 17:30

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Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
27 March 2008 19:59

I'll talk to him and start closing his requests that don't have interested native/fluent speakers.

Creation of approved wikis

GerardM asked the Board chair and Executive Director to ensure that approved wikis are created within a week. When neither responded, he crossposted a message to Foundation-l and Langcom-l. No useful conclusion was reached.

To Board of Trustees

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
CC Florence Nibart-Devouard (Board chair), Sue Gardner (Executive Director)
28 March 2008 07:01

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Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
28 March 2008 13:51

[Not CC'd to Sue and Florence]
Hello,
The problem I see is that the sysadmins who create wikis are volunteers, who will naturally tend to prioritise their own projects. Ideally, we should have a developer in the language subcommittee itself to do the requests once they're approved.
Should we discuss this on wikitech-l instead?
Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
28 March 2008 14:18

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Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
28 March 2008 14:38

I doubt Florence or Sue will be able to address this, but I'll wait and see. Cary (Volunteer Coordinator) would be a better choice, or a public discussion on Foundation-l might be constructive. I also think we should discuss this on Wikitech-l first; so far as I know, we've never brought this problem to the developers or sysadmins generally.

On Foundation-l

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
03 April 2008 14:54

Hoi,
Today I have had the pleasure of indicating that two request for new Wikis are "eligible". They are both Wikiversities, one in Finnish and one in Hungarian. Given the rules for new projects, they are clearly eligible and I was pleased to find that both languages had most of the localisation already been done. It is a pleasure because it means that all the projects in these languages benefit from the work done.
What I find really interesting is that three academic institutions are going to be involved in the Finnish Wikiversity. This gives on the face of it the project a flying start. :) It is also something quite special to have organisations involved in WMF projects.
At the bottom of the request for new languages page, you find the projects that are "closed". This means that they are either rejected or approved or created. Closed is very much seen from the perspective of the language committee as for the projects themselves it very much starts when the projects are created. The problem I want to share with you is that for proper closure, approved projects have to be created.
For the language committee we are about to consider again what projects may be given approval. It is important for the health of this process that once a project is approved by the board it is created, my question is what more can we do to ensure that the process is completed in a timely fashion?
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
03 April 2008 17:09

Hello,
Yes, this is the new problem. Now that the subcommittee can process requests much more quickly, with the reforms and new tools implemented a few months ago, the bottleneck is developers.
Quite simply, once we've approved a wiki, there's nobody who can be bothered to create the wikis. The developer who used to do it seems to have stopped (and never seems to be around to talk about it). The solution is to find a developer, or preferably several, who can create these wikis in a more timely fashion (within a century or so).
Mark Williamson (Node ue)
03 April 2008 17:19

I'm not sure what the issue is. I understand that developer time is limited, and that our developers are mostly volunteers, but from what I understand, new Wiki creation is not a time-intensive process. Can't the backlog just be cleared once a month or so?
Also, I have suggested it in the past and I will suggest it again: would it be possible to give powers of Wiki creation to someone who has that as their main duty?
Casey Brown (Cbrown1023)
03 April 2008 20:52

Mark Williamson wrote:

I'm not sure what the issue is. I understand that developer time is limited, and that our developers are mostly volunteers, but from what I understand, new Wiki creation is not a time-intensive process. Can't the backlog just be cleared once a month or so?

I have heard the complete opposite, something like "it is a very time-intensive process, but it takes almost the same amount of time to create one new wiki as to create a few, so we wait for a bunch to need to be made." (However, regarding the "bunch to be waiting in the queue", the Language subcommittee has already taken that into account and started making bug reports for new wikis in bulk, so there shouldn't really be a reason for such a long wait.)

Mark Williamson wrote:

Also, I have suggested it in the past and I will suggest it again: would it be possible to give powers of Wiki creation to someone who has that as their main duty?

er, their *only* Wikimedia duty? It really doesn't happen *that* much for someone to have that as their only job, imo; but more people would probably be helpful.
White Cat
06 April 2008 11:04

Weren't devs bottle nosed? Or was that dolphins?
We should be able to create a new wiki should w/o dev involvement. This should be a task for stewards.
Casey Brown (Cbrown1023)
06 April 2008 11:13

I think Wikia uses a special page to create wikis, perhaps that's possible for us? :-) /me opens up a bug page.

On Langcom-l

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
03 April 2008 14:54

Hoi,
Today I have had the pleasure of indicating that two request for new Wikis are "eligible". They are both Wikiversities, one in Finnish and one in Hungarian. Given the rules for new projects, they are clearly eligible and I was pleased to find that both languages had most of the localisation already been done. It is a pleasure because it means that all the projects in these languages benefit from the work done.
What I find really interesting is that three academic institutions are going to be involved in the Finnish Wikiversity. This gives on the face of it the project a flying start. :) It is also something quite special to have organisations involved in WMF projects.
At the bottom of the request for new languages page, you find the projects that are "closed". This means that they are either rejected or approved or created. Closed is very much seen from the perspective of the language committee as for the projects themselves it very much starts when the projects are created. The problem I want to share with you is that for proper closure, approved projects have to be created.
For the language committee we are about to consider again what projects may be given approval. It is important for the health of this process that once a project is approved by the board it is created, my question is what more can we do to ensure that the process is completed in a timely fashion?
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
03 April 2008 17:05

Hello,
Yes, this is the new problem. Now that we can process requests much more quickly, with the reforms and new tools implemented a few months ago, the bottleneck is developers.
Quite simply, once we've approved a wiki, there's nobody who can be bothered to create the wikis. JeLuF used to do it, but seems to have stopped (and never seems to be around to talk about it). The solution is to find a developer, or preferably several, who pledge to create these wikis.
If there's no objections, I'm going to start posting on a few mailing lists to discuss the problem and generate some increasingly public attention on the issue (starting with developers only). Ideally, we should have a few volunteer developers, or at least focus the community's attention on the problem to make creating new wikis a higher priority for developers.
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)
03 April 2008 17:09

Oh, I see you already did (although the title and body text won't grab much attention). I responded on Foundation-l.
Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
03 April 2008 17:13

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