Resolution:Language Committee Charter
 | This proposal has been approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. It may not be circumvented, eroded, or ignored by Wikimedia Foundation officers or staff nor local policies of any Wikimedia project. Please note that in the event of any differences in meaning or interpretation between the original English version of this content and a translation, the original English version takes precedence. |
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| This resolution approved the Language Committee charter laying out its scope and duties. It was unanimously approved online on October 16, 2012. |
Resolved, that the Board of Trustees approves the Language Committee Charter, laying out the scope and duties of the Language Committee.
Language Committee Charter
Scope
The committee is tasked as follows.
- The development and maintenance of:
- a clear step-by-step policy (based on quantitative indicators) for evaluating the feasibility of new language wikis, with an automated procedure for project development;
- support and policy development for script and localization related problems;
- documentation to support new language communities towards a stable growth rate;
- support and coordination for cross-language projects, helping smaller communities share resources and maximize their results;
- support and coordination to maintain compatibility among the different MediaWiki installations, in order to reduce the amount of development needed to upgrade the program base as far as localization is concerned.
- The processing of requests for new language subdomains of existing Wikimedia projects, providing it gives the Wikimedia Board of Trustees four days advance notice before approving a request.
Goals
The goals of the committee are to:
- minimize the political aspects connected to the release of new projects, moving the focus towards purely quantitative decision criteria;
- minimize the need of localization-related funding and development by providing a common shared policy;
- maximize the reuse of proven marketing techniques among different editions;
- maximize the co-operation level among different language communities by providing common fields of activity;
- achieve the widest possible localization level for MediaWiki at the lowest cost, in order to maintain and improve its leading role as an open-source content management system.
Transparency
- The whole set of activities of the language committee is public, and any advice from the community is welcome.
- The committee values the fact that projects are a property of the single editors who make it and considers users' necessities as the primary source for policy.
- The committee is especially interested in hearing those who proposed a new wiki in the past and got either refused or approved.
Votes
- Approve: Ting Chen, Bishakha Datta, Matt Halprin, Samuel Klein, Patricio Lorente, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Jimmy Wales, Kat Walsh, Stu West, Alice Wiegand