Talk:Language proposal policy/2019-04 proposed revision

Discussion and !voting procedures

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

This discussion is open as of 21:00, 17 April 2019 (UTC). It will remain open until around 23:59, 19 May 2019 (UTC).
This discussion is closed as of 16:00, 30 May 2019 (UTC), as there have been no comments for the last two weeks.

Support

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Oppose

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  •   Oppose, overall change didn't make much sense to me, I think we need to specially craft a new rule/policy and don't use standardized language tag at all and only consider it from the educational and usability value perspective, this caused from my views that Ancient Language is educational and Fictional language are not, this is my bias, but seeing this (Talk:Language_proposal_policy#Why_ISO_discrimination?) and this (Talk:Language_proposal_policy#Better_version_of_code_requirement) I really do think we should just consider the usability and educational value instead.--AldnonymousBicara? 21:32, 17 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
  •   Oppose, the wording "sufficient number of fluent contributors to form a viable community and audience" makes no sense. An audience isn't formed by contributors. And the audience, not the community, is really what matters here. The "native audience" criterion should be strengthened rather than relaxed: for a viable project, we need a substantial number of people for whom the language in question would be a preferred, natural medium of information. Not just people who know the language, or might like to practice it, but people who would actually prefer using it rather than some other language for obtaining information about the world. We don't want wikis that only function as linguistic playgrounds for language enthusiasts.
    There also needs to be a stronger criterion for what constitutes "fluency", especially if, in the future, these rules might also be applied to historic/dead languages (according to the possible future extension that was hinted at above). We saw this problem in the case of the incubator "Ancient Greek" wiki: there is undoubtedly some popular demand for such a wiki, and a number of people enthusiastic enough to try their hands on it – but not a single one among them so far has actually been able to write anything recognizable as proper, grammatical Ancient Greek. Fut.Perf. 21:46, 27 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
    @Future Perfect at Sunrise: We all know that you are the most opposer (sic) of Ancient Greek, but as the lead text said, these ancient and historical are to be discussed in the next ground of revisions, not currently ground. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 09:58, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
    @Future Perfect at Sunrise and Liuxinyu970226: As Liuxinyu said, "ancient and historical", including Ancient Greek, is not on the table at the moment.
    I can see where perhaps "sufficient number of people who can competently communicate in the language", or something of that sort, might be better phraseology. My point in drafting this was more that it doesn't really matter if the language is a contributor's (or reader's) native language or second language; it is sufficient if a person can communicate competently in it (or can read it competently). And I will point out that even ignoring (for this argument) ancient, historical and artificial/constructed languages, there are a variety of creoles and pidgins here that are almost never anyone's L1, but are nevertheless eligible (actually or potentially). StevenJ81 (talk) 15:45, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
    I'm well aware the ancient languages aren't on the table right now, but I find it hard to think that whenever such a follow-up proposal should be made it wouldn't also build and expand upon the criteria as established here, so I don't think it's entirely off-topic to check them for how they would work out for that future case. But the example of the ancient languages also highlights a more general issue that applies to other "non-native" varieties in a similar way: basing your criteria on concepts of "fluency" or "competency", in the absence of native speaker populations, is problematic. For without native speakers, you'll not only have difficulties finding enough fluent or competent writers; the crucial problem is you won't even have an operational criterion for what counts as "fluent" or "competent" in the first place. Because without the corrective standard of native-speaker intuition, prospective writers have only their own, faulty, introspection to go by in assessing what counts as acceptable expression in the language. You'll easily get entire wiki communities of self-overrating writers, who will happily produce gibberish without ever receiving corrective input. That's what we're seeing in all the "ancient" wikis (both the existing official ones and the incubators, the "Ancient Greek" one being a particularly crass example), and you'd very likely get the same in living non-native varieties if you opened the system up to them. Fut.Perf. 07:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
    @Future Perfect, I take your point. Still, policy explicitly allows ConLangs under certain conditions. At least one pidgin has been marked as eligible, implying that pidgins—which by definition are not first languages for anyone—are allowable. With respect to extinct languages, at minimum there is sympathy in LangCom for allowing projects in recently extinct languages with serious revival efforts underway, provided that Wikimedia isn't the main hub of the revival. So on the assumption that the policy is always going to allow projects in at least some languages without actual native speakers, how would you word this? StevenJ81 (talk) 14:41, 1 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

Discussion

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Wording of #4

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The proposed (and, actually, the current) wording for #4 doesn't really make sense. I suggest something like:

The language has a sufficient number of fluent users to form a viable contributor community, and an audience for the content.

Libcub (talk) 05:49, 30 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

I think you are right. Another possibility would be to say "the language has ...", which would make the point start with the same words as no. 2 and 3. --MF-W 20:52, 13 May 2019 (UTC)Reply
I'm fine with that. See revision on proposal page. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:10, 15 May 2019 (UTC)Reply

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