Talk:Language proposal policy/2019-04 proposed revision

Link to the proposal

Discussion and !voting procedures

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

•  Support --Agusbou2015 (talk) 18:25, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support Wish this revision can solve many community conflicts. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 23:02, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support 夢蝶葬花 (talk) 06:47, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support Parecen cambios sensatos. B25es (talk) 10:30, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support --Novak Watchmen (talk) 20:14, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support Seems to be a minor improvement, although I would support even more liberality, especially for Ancient Languages. Dovi (talk) 10:15, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

  Dovi, LangCom will probably bring a proposal out on that later in the year. But there is some serious difference of opinion on the committee, so I'm not sure exactly what that will look like yet. מועדים לשמחה StevenJ81 (talk) 13:57, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

•  Support --ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 18:45, 22 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support Muhraz (talk) 08:34, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support Ebe123 (Communication | Activity report) 20:51, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support --OosWesThoesBes (talk) 13:18, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
•  Support --MarcoSwart (talk) 09:04, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
•  Support --Sombra Inquieta (talk) 19:21, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Oppose

•  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.--Aldnonymous^Bicara? 21:32, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
•  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)

  @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)

  @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)

  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)

  @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)

Discussion

• I am in support of no. 1, but do not remove the basic requirement of using ISO 639. I am also in support of no. 2, as there are reasonable educational value can be gained from it. I am against for no. 3, fictional language will never be massively used when there are no government or cultural compulsion to use it, the usability itself is debated, as I see no educational value can be gained from this. I still have more opinion about the overall proposal, but the fact no 1 2 and 3 proposal can't be separated, I choose to comment here rather than voting. Thank you (I will add more comment later as situation grows and/or more information can be gained)--Aldnonymous^Bicara? 21:13, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

  @Aldnonymous: These three points are not the proposal. The proposal is on the content page that this is talk page for. StevenJ81 (talk) 21:15, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

  Oh I see, I already read it now, btw StevenJ81 can you separate the proposal into several section? I want to be able to vote for Language_proposal_policy/4-2019_proposed_revision#From:_Specific_issues as oppose, but for other things I want to support. If I gave support on this proposal then I have to support it as a whole, and vice versa for the oppose.--Aldnonymous^Bicara? 21:18, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

  Addendum, please separate that section into a 3 section proposal, one for ancient language, one for fictional/artificial/conlang and one for Unicode requirement.--Aldnonymous^Bicara? 21:20, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

  They really go together. What do you oppose in the "Specific issues", while supporting the rest? StevenJ81 (talk) 21:24, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

  Scratch that just realized IETF language tag also include artificial conlang.--Aldnonymous^Bicara? 21:27, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

• Can we please use {{ch}} to visualize the diffs instead? In some languages, the usage of underlines can really be confusing, as they may just think that these are somewhat important, even it may lead to some old decaded import points. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 14:36, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

  I didn't know that existed. I'm going to leave the side-by-side framework in place, but will replace the underlining. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:46, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

  Done StevenJ81 (talk) 15:04, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

• Another thing: Will there be possible to add a rule, that explains that in which cases, the status of an eligible request can be cancelled their eligibility? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:17, 28 April 2019 (UTC)
  • Why should that happen? --MF-W 20:54, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
    • @MF-Warburg: e.g. If one man wrongly created a proposal as "eligible". --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 11:17, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
      • That seems very irrelevant, as that would not be a langcom action. --MF-W 11:30, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
        • Exactly. Besides, if you look near the bottom of Language committee/Voting policy, you'll see that LangCom can reverse a posting of eligibility even by a member of LangCom. (It shouldn't be a common practice, but it is allowed.) StevenJ81 (talk) 13:55, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
• Multiple elements of this proposed change appear to be w:en:WP:BEANS - telling people how they may craft a challenge. - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews} 02:13, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

  I take your point. Still, BEANS usually applies to things that can be damaging. Here, there is no harm if people try to craft a challenge. Remember that even if such a challenge is crafted, getting it to succeed extremely difficult. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:04, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

  Can you explain? Is it because of the "please do not use these projects as an argument" sentence? --MF-W 20:54, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

  I'll let @Amgine explain himself/herself. I took the comment to mean that if we generally discourage requests for non-ISO-639-3 languages, we should not describe the exact path that someone needs to take in order to be able to make such a request. In my view, it is highly unlikely that this will open the floodgates, as it sends the potential requester first to SIL to get a code, and then to us to prove that the request overcomes rule #3 (the "sufficiently unique" rule). StevenJ81 (talk) 14:03, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

• When will you close this discussion? --Agusbou2015 (talk) 17:49, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

  May as well be now. There have been no comments for two weeks. I've just been extremely busy IRL, and cannot follow up immediately. But let's call this closed all the same. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:57, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

Wording of #4

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)

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)

I'm fine with that. See revision on proposal page. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:10, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.