Hoi,
Let us have a sense of history here. When the language committee started,
there were no linguists or other experts members on the committee. We were
really happy when we got someone who is part of the standard bodies that are
relevant to what we do. It meant that we had a way to assess what the
likelihood was for requests to the standard bodies. The only problem was
that for professional reasons it is not possible to publish the point of
views expressed publicly. As this may affect the employability, this is not
a trivial matter and confidentiality is the only way got relevant and
significant contributions.
As a consequence, the mailing list for the language committee became
confidential. At a later date, some members were not happy with a
confidential list and wanted to make *their* contributions public. I opposed
this because it is not that hard to deduce what someone said by the answers
from others. As a consequence I keep my contributions private to the members
of the committee.
At a later date we started to seek expert opinion about the contributions in
the incubator to ensure that contributions were in the language that goes
with the ISO-639-3 code. The comments of these experts are in some cases
best kept private. We seek assurances for ourselves so that we can honestly
inform the WMF board that in our opinion a project in a new language can
start.
The policy allows for only one Wikipedia per language and, requests by
people that seek to force one orthography or one script do not find
acceptance in the policy and by the committee. At that we deliberately keep
such deliberations outside of the WMF LC and leave it to the standard bodies
to define what makes a specific language.
If this gives you the impression that there is not that much to discuss, you
are completely correct.
Thanks,
GerardM
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