Language committee/Reports/2012-12

This is the language committee report for November and December 2012.

The MediaWiki localisation requirements for new language versions were considerably lowered: It remains unchanged that for a first project in a language, the 500 most used messages should be translated; but for any subsequent project, it is no longer necessary to translate the complete core plus main extensions used on Wikimedia projects, only to prove that the community is continuing to improve the localisation at a reasonable pace.

Assamese Wikisource has been approved (waiting for creation).
A request for a Wikipedia in Dari Persian has been rejected because the language was not considered to be sufficiently distinct from Standard Persian (fa:).
Minangkabau Wikipedia was verified as eligible.
Piedmontese Wiktionary has been verified as eligible.
Closure of Min Nan Wikisource has been rejected.

The topic of the ISO code for the Mapundungun language (see July report) has been brought up again, namely by the "Red de Derechos Lingüísticos y Culturales de los Pueblos Indígenas de Chile". The conclusion of a heated discussion was to ask the ISO 639 authority to consider a change, which Michael Everson proposed to them. A discussion on the Ietf-languages list about it can be found at [1].
As mentioned in the previous report, new language versions need to take the usual process of the language proposal policy, except 8 languages, for which content from preexisting Wikitravel projects can be used as a base. The creation of these projects is requested one-by-one considering the interest of a community for it. At the time, Spanish and Portuguese Wikivoyage are waiting for creation & editors are already able to contribute on Incubator.