Requests for comment/Amend language policy to ban new conlang Wikipedias

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Should the language proposal policy be amended to disallow new proposals for conlang (constructed language) Wikipedia editions?

The rationale here is that the vast majority of conlangs are very similar to dead languages because they have zero (or practically zero) native speakers. In fact many if not most constructed languages are also extinct (or functionally extinct) languages. Esperanto is the only constructed language that has any non-trivial number of native speakers, or really any non-trivial number of fluent speakers period. Therefore any other constructed language edition of Wikipedia has no plausible educational value as an encyclopedia and would have severe difficulties even functioning due to the extremely low number of fluent speakers.

A few clarifications:

• This does not refer to fictional languages, which are already banned
• This would not invalidate proposals that are already open, per note 1
• This only refers to new Wikipedia editions. Existing editions, as well as all sister projects, would be unaffected.

Please share your thoughts below. Dronebogus (talk) 02:25, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Oppose We tend to be pretty open with languages that are being brought back. My concerns with dead languages is that they're often bad examples of what the language is, and aren't used by the speakers of the language.

Conlangs that pass the incubator have a community that will use them. They may be most useful in covering their own worlds, but they do produce encyclopedias that people can actually use.

Let's look at LFN and Kotava, the most recent conlangs. On List of Wikipedias, Kotava comes about middle of the pack, with almost 30,000 articles; poking around akv:w:Xadola, it looks a lot like its neighbors. Compare Nepali, for example. LFN is quite a bit further down the page, with 4,500 articles (still better than 100 Wikipedias), but when you look at the articles, it has much longer articles than almost any smaller Wikipedia I've looked at. I think the handful of future conlang WPs will continue to produce average Wikipedias of interest to an audience.--Prosfilaes (talk) 19:01, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

And I think it’s actually a pretty sad statement that our best small Wikipedias are the ones almost nobody can realistically use. Maltese has upwards of half a million speakers and has fewer than 7000 articles; Khmer has 17 million speakers and only about 10,000 articles. While the amount of resources actually taken from these projects to support yet more moribund euroclones is negligible, it’s still embarrassing to put the interests of tiny groups of hobbyists on par with national languages countless people use for serious everyday purposes. It’s like comparing model trains to real ones— yes it’s very nice model train enthusiasts have a vibrant community, but no-one is debating real ones are far more useful and important. Dronebogus (talk) 09:28, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

So the only argument is that it's somehow "embarrassing" to support these languages, because people are working on these languages and not Maltese and Khmer? How does banning conlangs get people to work on conlangs they aren't because they read English (in Maltese's case) or because they don't have computers and Internet access (in Khmer's case)? Denigrate as you will -- you could argue stillborn, but moribund is just wrong -- but these are real languages that real encyclopedias are being written in.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:25, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Stillborn is better than moribund? It’s arguably worse— one implies the language had momentum at one point, the other implies it never had momentum to begin with. Dronebogus (talk) 03:12, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

It may be worse, but it's more correct. The conlangs really under discussion are not dying out; they're relatively new creations with a thriving community. I don't think Neo will go anywhere, and if it does that probably means it's no closer to death than it ever was.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:11, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

“Relatively new” basically means not shown to have any staying power or value. It’s a truism that things that haven’t been around very long may not last very far into the future; a “thriving community” today could dwindle to practically zero in 10 years. Dronebogus (talk) 13:52, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

•  Oppose If a conlang doesn't have a community that is big enough to properly function, if it's of no use to anybody outside of its fan group, then it likely won't get an ISO 639-3 code and most certainly won't have a test project good enough to leave Incubator. And since the current policy already includes those criteria, the amendment is redundant. Furthermore, none of us (to my knowledge) are prophets here; new conlangs keep coming along, and it's entirely posssible that one day one of them might actually be worth something. And by the way, is there any reasoning for leaving existing wikis and submitted proposals out of this? Besides Dronebogus having tried to close some them and failing, that is. Certainly, the amendment as it stands declares every conlang other than Esperanto useless, with no exceptions for the ones with existing Wikipedias. AtUkr^{(talk to me)} 19:47, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

  It’s something called the w:grandfather clause. We don’t allow new extinct language Wikipedias; it’s not like we closed all of those when we implemented that policy. As for existing open proposals— it’d be entirely unfair to proposers and supporters to invalidate them retroactively via a novel policy. In any case the meat of your argument is still poor: Ancient Greek has a valid ISO code, and has the best test project on Incubator— it is still of no use to anybody outside of language enthusiasts and maybe some scholars/students. Finally, as for new conlangs ever becoming useful… the current score is Esperanto and maybe Interslavic (if you were extremely generous) to countless failed attempts at making “the Esperanto killer”. I wouldn’t put money on that ever changing; if it did (and I’m thinking decades in the future if it were to occur, since it would have to be very widely adopted) we could just amend the policy again. Dronebogus (talk) 23:34, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

•  Oppose Having no native speakers doesn't mean having no speakers. (We can suppose that every constructed language in ISO 639-9 has a group of speakers.) Latin and standard Arabic have no native speakers, either; if it's not a good idea to remove them, I don't think it's good to prohibit new conlang Wikipedias.--CopperSulfate (talk) 22:08, 26 October 2024 (UTC)