Wiktionary talk:Votes/2024-06/CFI for mainspace constructed languages

Option to exclude all constructed languages

Option 2 reserves Esperanto to remain in the main namespace. I think there should be an option to relegate all constructed languages to the appendix namespace, including Esperanto. I'd likely lean toward it being in the main namespace due to the fact that there have been at least some native speakers, but I think it's a reasonable option to include. Does anyone else agree? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:09, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Hmmm, personally, I feel that it'd almost certainly fail. Out of the discussions I've seen this would be the first mention of Esperanto being relegated to the Appendix, so I don't feel like there'd be appetite for it. AG202 (talk) 23:15, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Sure but it failing would just verify that consensus is explicitly in favor of it being in the main namespace. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:09, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I would hope that Proposal 1 & Proposal 2 would make that clear. I've said it before, but I generally find votes that the proposer knows is going to fail ahead of time to be wastes of time. AG202 (talk) 00:20, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Reasonable. I won't push for it, then. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:29, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I think the fact that Esperanto is the only conlang in the world with a community of native speakers sets it apart from other conlangs, and justifies a different level of discretion from other conlangs.

For most languages we record words as used by native speakers, which we can't do for most conlangs as they have no native speakers and, theoretically, anyone could just make up words and they would be "legitimate words" in the language. However, since Esperanto actually has native speakers, we can actually record words as-used instead of how people who made up the word would like them to be used. Also, according to Wikipedia, Esperanto has actually made it into the education systems of some countries such as Hungary.

Thats not to say I'm a fan of Esperanto or anything, I'm just saying that I feel as though it's distinct enough from other conlangs to be considered separately. — SAMEER (؂・؄・؏) 23:49, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Option to use objective criteria instead of making this a popularity contest

I totally don't understand the point of this discussion and this vote. The Main Page of this project writes clearly: "It aims to describe all words of all languages using definitions and descriptions in English." Constructed languages are languages, so why does the label "constructed" compel so many people to feel the need to fight them? At present, we have Esperanto, Volapük, Ido and Interlingua. All four of them are represented on a page like this one, amidst hundreds of other languages. Do they really hurt the eye so much that they would have to be removed? Will that make the list any better? Or is it because people fear a tsunami of conlangs if they are not regulated by some policy? If so, that fear is not unreasonable: there are hundreds of reasonably developed conlangs and thousands of less developed ones, mostly used only by their creators. Of course we don't want hundreds of conlangers to create entries for their youngest pet project. But this can easily be addressed by applying certain criteria.

Alright, but using native speakers as a criterion is a bad idea, because auxiliary languages are not meant to have native speakers by design: they are meant to serve as an L2 for as many people as possible. The fact that Esperanto has native speakers is nothing but a side effect of its popularity, and as far as I know, all native speakers of Esperanto have been raised bilingually anyway. For the record, apparently there have been native speakers of Volapük in the past as well, and in 2022 suddenly 26 native speakers of Ido popped up in Finland, out of the blue. But why should native speakers be a criterion at all, since we allow so many other languages that are either extinct or never even had native speakers at all? Just like historical linguistics, interlinguistics is a science, not some kind of hobby. And dictionaries are not only there for speakers, but also for people who study them for other reasons, including scientists. How many people speak Phoenician, Hittite, Old Church Slavonic, Biblical Gothic, Polabian or Old Tupi? Probably less than the number of people who speak Interlingua or even Volapük. Does that invalidate translations into or from those languages? Of course not!

The current condition, a valid ISO code, already limits the number of potential conlangs to 24. The criteria mentioned in the policy for creating new projects narrow down their number even further: "If the proposal is for an artificial language such as Esperanto, it must have a reasonable degree of recognition as determined by discussion. (Some recognition criteria include, but are not limited to: independently proved number of speakers, use as an auxiliary language outside of online communities created solely for the purpose, usage outside of Wikimedia, publication of works in the language for general sale.) Notwithstanding the existence of an ISO 639–3 code, fictional languages are not eligible for projects." We could even take this one step further: allow only those constructed languages that match these criteria AND have been approved by the LangCom, in other words: only those languages that have their own Wikipedia. That way, we have a criterion that is both objective and practical. Objective, because every aspect is thoroughly verified by a group of knowledgeable people (LangCom). And practical, because it can be helpful both for users of these Wikipedias and for those who want to keep an eye on them. Isn't that a better solution than organizing a popularity contest?

Two last remarks: first of all, deleting everything about Interlingua, Ido and Volapük would be a slap in the face of the volunteers who have worked on them for years. It is simply indecent to allow people to work on something for years, just to wipe it out because some others don't like constructed languages. It's not like their work takes up an awful lot of space, nor does it stand in anyone's way, nor is there anything wrong with its content. And secondly, appendixifying everything not a good idea, because that way it becomes one-way traffic. Myself, I am more of a user than a contributor, and I use Wiktionary on a daily base for looking up translations from English into other languages. IJzeren Jan (talk) 23:01, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

@IJzeren Jan: No entries are being deleted. What would actually happen if this vote were to pass would be that the Interlingua, Ido, & Volapük entries would be moved to the Appendix. The same thing happened with Lojban, Novial, & Interlingue, and as seen by the linked categories, their entries still exist. So again, the entries aren't being deleted, it just won't be in the mainspace. If you think about it, Reconstructed languages aren't even in the mainspace either. As for the translations, they may be removed but honestly, that's something that can be discussed further later on. And as for the "motto" that Wiktionary uses, I've also been a critic of it so it doesn't sway my thoughts either way.

Moving on to the other main point: I have yet to see a policy here that relies on other Wikimedia projects, such as relying on LangCom, though these users: (Notifying -sche, The Editor's Apprentice): would have more information on that. As such, it would not be practical at all for us to use whether or not a Wikipedia "exists" as a guideline. It's also not entirely "objective". I've seen LangCom's procedures, and it's really up to individual people in the end, with their scope being entirely different to begin with. This also doesn't take into account the projects that were grandfathered in like the Lojban Wikipedia which likely would not have been approved if proposed under the current guidelines.

Regarding Ido, you bring up a good point, but I'm suspicious of the numbers and what the dataset actually describes. The same data states that there's 1 Esperanto speaker and 1 Latin speaker. If we take these to mean "native", then there has to be community of Ido speakers in the country, but has it been actually been verified? We'd need to do more digging.

Overall, this project works on our own consensus. I framed the vote after combing through tons of discussions and comments, and the vast majority of editors in those discussions have asked for this change. It's not just a popularity contest, as seen by the recent addition of Eskayan to the list after doing meaningful research about its usage. It's hard for the community to agree on anything to begin with, but with this, it's almost a universally wanted change, and as such, I'm moving it along with hopes of actually getting it done. AG202 (talk) 02:15, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Also, looking at Ido Wikipedia's active user list, it says that there are 55 active users, but if you actually take the time to look at the contributions, the vast majority of them are changes to image files, new automated messages, category changes, or nothing at all. It's practically dead. It's also one of the Wikipedia's that was created (2004) before LangCom was instituted and during a time when "criteria for creation of new language editions of Wikipedia were poorly defined and there was little process in place for determining which requests would be acted upon." That's part of why I don't like using the existence of a Wikipedia as a guideline. AG202 (talk) 02:47, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Please explain this to me: what is the point of moving these entries to the appendix, if they are staying here anyway? What is there to be gained from that move? You see, my whole problem with this thing is the absence of a rationale: they only argument I'm seeing is that Toki Pona has more users than Volapük, and that's why Volapük, Interlingua and Ido must disappear. That is, of course, complete nonsense! It might as well be used as an argument for including Toki Pona, or for defining better criteria for inclusion instead of organizing a vote about three individual languages.

And as for the translations: I just checked and all Interlingue translations were deleted by a bot simultaneously with the transfer to appendix space. Even if that's not going to happen right away, we both know that it's going to happen soon afterwards anyway.

The advantage of my proposal is that we'd leave the decision to people who actually know what they are talking about. And of course, I am aware of the fact that many projects were started before there was a clear policy, but also take into account that LangCom has approved editions in Lingua Franca Nova and Kotava, both languages with a very small number of users. And those decision were based on policy. Of course, I am aware of the fact that every project establishes its own rules, but those rules should not be based on popularity contests (because I still believe that that is exactly what this is).

At last, let me say something about those 55 active Ido users. Please take a look at the List of Wikipedias. You'll notice that even with this admittedly low number Ido safely belongs to the upper half. For comparison: Gujarati, a language with more than 60 million speakers, has 67 active users. Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia, has 57. Both including the same bots, username changes etc. Also, if you look at the number of articles, and the number of edits made, you'll see that all three Wikipedia editions belong to the upper half as well. To stay with Ido: in two years, its number of articles has grown from 32,803 to 48,274. Quite a lot for a language with only a handful users, don't you think? Not that it should matter much though, because more importantly: wouldn't you agree that encyclopedias and dictionaries are there for the people who use them, and not for the people who write them? IJzeren Jan (talk) 19:04, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

In the end, additions/removals to WT:CFI would need to be decided by consensus anyways. Option 1 provides us a way to do it without necessitating a formal vote every single time. Whether we like it or not, there's not a consensus right now to base this change on LangCom or the existence of other Wikipedias. That's just not how we work here. Relying on the existence of a Wikipedia would also force languages like Lojban to come back to the mainspace which would violate completed votes and long-established consensus. I'm not going to put something for a vote that I know will fail and hasn't been discussed fully. If you'd like to propose the policy, feel free to create a vote or make a BP thread. I'm also acutely aware of the other languages that have low activity; I took a look at that list yesterday. However, the difference is that they are not constructed languages and have, as stated, millions of native speakers, and as such, have strong literary and oral histories outside of Wikipedia, and would not need Wikipedia articles to validate their existence. As for Ido, I'm going to bring it up in the current BP discussion and see what people think. AG202 (talk) 19:52, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Okay, but I still haven't heard a single meritorical argument. Without it, it remains a case of IDONTLIKEIT, even if 99% of all Wiktionary users agree about it. So please enlighten me: how is this operation going to make Wiktionary a better place?

You speak about long literal and oral histories, but Volapük has those as well, and the fact that its community is small at the moment does not change the fact that it has had hundreds of thousands of users in the past. Even today, a monthly in Volapük has been appearing since 1989 without ever skipping a single month, resulting in 100 solid pages of text each year. How does that make it any worse than Phoenician (no speakers at all, known only from a number of inscriptions)? And why should it make a difference that Volapük is a constructed language? After all, every human language has a certain degree of artificiality, and there is a large grey zone between both extremes on the scale of artificiality. IJzeren Jan (talk) 20:42, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

One benefit, brought up at Wiktionary:Votes/2021-02/Moving Interlingue entries to the Appendix, is that if moved to the Appendix, the threshold for inclusion of a term in Volapük for example, would be lowered, only requiring one use in a durably archived source. However, in the mainspace, as is right now, Volapük is a WT:WDL, meaning that it if a term is sent to RFV, it'd require 3 uses in durably archived sources to pass. Looking at Category:Volapük lemmas and going through some entries, a lot of them would likely fail RFV and be deleted. It's just a matter of time before someone actually goes through them, seeing as only 31 entries have quotations out of 2590 lemmas which is very low. This vote would at least allow them to be moved to the Appendix ahead of time, so that'd be a benefit. AG202 (talk) 21:16, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Do you have any idea how much books and magazines have been published in Volapük? I am not even speaking about the dozens of grammars and dictionaries, but also about literary and other works. Many of which, of course, are not available online; and if they are, most likely not in a searchable format. But even without those, it wouldn't be a problem for me to produce a hundred quotes a day based on the sources that ARE available.

I admit that I had never noticed those quotation categories before. I just had a look at them, starting with my native language, Dutch. It has a total of 58,081 lemmas, of which only 1309 have quotations. Frisian has 1748 lemmas, of which only 21 have quotations. Amharic has 1578 lemmas, of which only have quotations. And of the Esperanto lemmas only have quotations. I didn't check any other languages, but based on these four, it's safe to assume that for most languages goes that only 1-10% of the lemmas have quotations. It is not your intention to have all Dutch, Frisian, Amharic and Esperanto entries without quotations deleted, I suppose. So why then, pray tell, should Volapük be an exception? IJzeren Jan (talk) 23:12, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

It's not my intention to run any language, but I'd note that Frisian & Amharic are not WDLs like Volapük is, and as such do not require quotes and even allow 1 mention to count. We also do not allow self-published works to count to CFI, so I'd keep that in mind. And yes the same regulations apply to Esperanto, though I expect it to be much easier to show usage. AG202 (talk) 23:16, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

But on the other hand, Dutch is a WDL, right? So that means that 98% of all Dutch lemmas do NOT fulfil the criteria for inclusion. Forgive me for going on about this, but I still don't understand WHY this, and many other things you mentioned, should be a problem in the case of Volapük and not in the case of 4800 other languages. IJzeren Jan (talk) 23:35, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

It should be abundantly clear the difference between Dutch and Volapük. A lot of Dutch terms fall under the other prong of WT:ATTEST: clear widespread use. Constructed languages have their own section in WT:CFI; they’re going to be treated differently regardless. AG202 (talk) 00:41, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

@AG202, let me first thank you for your civil tone in this discussion. I honestly appreciate that! That said, I still fail to understand the why of this operation. Instead of a single objective reason, all I see is a whole series of ad hoc arguments, none of which could stand on its own legs, and the only recurring argument seems to be that a majority of the community wants it. But why does the very label "constructed" evoke such reactions? I know very well that there are people who think all constructed languages are nonsense, but of all places, people at Wiktionary ought to know better, wouldn't you agree? I mean, we are talking about languages of great historical importance here, not about some one-man hobby thing without any impact. IJzeren Jan (talk) 20:02, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

@IJzeren Jan: Thank you for the kind comments about tone, and I appreciate your civility as well. Part of the issue that we've been encountering as of late is that we keep getting BP threads about other conlangs that invoke the question of "why do we include Volapük, but not Interslavic", and from what I've seen, the userbase is entirely against adding more conlangs, so this vote hopes to create a system where there's more criteria for conlangs vs our lack of actual criteria right now that's basically based on vibes. AG202 (talk) 15:18, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Or let's put it differently: if I manage to provide, say, 250 Volapük lemmas with three quotations within a week, would you consider removing Volapük from your proposal? IJzeren Jan (talk) 23:38, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I support any addition of quotations in general, it's one of my tenants here with creating entries, but I cannot guarantee that it'd remove Volapük from the list. AG202 (talk) 15:14, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

@AG202 The entries aren't deleted but all of the translations added were. Here's a sample of the bot merrily undoing the thousands of entries I spent weeks adding to when the decision was made for Interlingue/Occidental. Mithridates (talk) 02:00, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

My point exactly. One month before the Interlingua entries were deleted, it was formally decided that Interlingue was among the languages qualified for inclusion. And then, suddenly, it takes only 15 people to decide to delete it anyway. It would have been a different story if it had been made clear from the beginning that these languages are not welcome; but explicitly inviting people for twenty years to work on something and then deleting it all for no other reason than that a few people don't like it... No, that's definitely not how you create a safe working environment. IJzeren Jan (talk) 07:05, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I'll first say that Interlingue was first added to CFI in 2005, by a user that unfortunately has since passed away. I can't find the original discussion, but it may have just been added when the project was nascent and there weren't nearly as many procedures in place. As such, it was not just added in 2020 before the Interlingue vote. The vote in 2020 only changed the CFI for conlangs in the Appendix as the vote stated, so I'd like to correct the record on that part.

I'd sincerely hesitate before calling it an unsafe working environment for the reason of the deletion of translations (I can think of plenty of harassment/discrimination-related reasons that create that environment). I understand that you work very closely with Volapük and are rightly worried about deletion of material, but seeing as though only the translations would be deleted, I want us to avoid a doomsday mass deletion sort of thought process as that will cause me to pull away from the discussion.

Policies change, and like I said this project works on consensus. If 7 more people voted oppose in the above vote to delete Interlingue, then it would not have passed. I've argued very strongly for and against certain policies that didn't go my way, but regardless I see it necessary to continue working on what's important to me in the end. Votes like those only rely on how strongly one side can convince the other, and at this point I'm still not putting up the vote until I get more clarification/consensus on certain issues either way. AG202 (talk) 15:06, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Well, here I beg to differ. Even if with regard to Interlingue the 2020 vote was just a confirmation of the status quo, that doesn't change the fact that it was official policy. Nor that, practically from the beginning the text, on the Main Page ("a free multilingual dictionary in every language", later: "It aims to describe all words of all languages") has been an open invitation to contribute in Interlingue as well. With "unsafe working environment" I do, of course, not mean death threats or sexual harassment, but the risk that a sudden change in policy might easily cause the annihilation of many weeks or months work by several volunteers. It would have been a different story if certain languages had been excluded from the beginning, or even before any substantial work had been done on them. But changing the rules during the game, that's just not cricket. IJzeren Jan (talk) 18:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree that it's disorienting for all the translations to be removed, and that's something I'll push for more discussion about. However, as an aside, posts like this one that misrepresent the proposal sincerely make me not want to interact with the author in the future. It misrepresented @Koavf's point of view (they do not want Esperanto removed from the mainspace and the discussion was already resolved beforehand) and misstates the urgency of the proposal (it still has not been put up officially at all!). I'm honestly a bit disappointed, considering how much effort I'm putting in to reply to these comments in the first place, when with other votes I've seen, authors don't even reply to a single one of these :-/ AG202 (talk) 15:13, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

@AG202 I also appreciate the civil tone. However, I don't think many have given thought to how much of a panic it creates when even a single user or small group of users starts talking about deleting content or closing projects. To name a few over the past years and currently:

• The Interlingue Wikibooks was closed down when I had a few years where I was unable to devote any time to the language. When I came back I had a whole book I intended to write, and I did on the English Wikibooks - a full 100 chapters long.
• The Interlingue entries mentioned here that were deleted (weeks of my time gone in an instant)
• Two nominations for deletion of the Volapük and Novial Wikipedias
• Novial before that.

All of those went by without my knowledge and I certainly would have liked to see a post on /r/auxlangs about it.

As for the user's comment: I don't know how else you would interpret the comment "I think there should be an option to relegate all constructed languages to the appendix namespace, including Esperanto." - even if the user is leaning towards including it. Plus the link on /r/auxlangs goes directly to this page where the entire discussion is kept.

In addition, the page for the proposal has the following: "they are the only languages with a strong community consensus for inclusion currently." Note the word *currently*. A while back the "current" consensus included Novial, then it didn't. Then the current consensus removed Interlingue. This page is now deeming the "current" consensus to include Esperanto. How does that look as an Esperantist (I'm not, but many others are) to see the bar drawn up so high and musing about further restrictions?

Re: misstating the urgency of the proposal: sure, but when a proposal goes up for a vote it is decided in the space of a month, as @IJzeren Jan noted. Nobody in the Interlingue community ever heard about it, nobody came by the Interlingue Wikipedia to mention it. It's not surprising that the people who actually knew about the discussion were the ones that voted for it, while nobody else had any idea what was going on. Interlingue has a huge amount of content going back to the 1920s and all of the words could have been attested using these resources if anyone had known. Cosmoglotta alone has over 300 issues. We could have *easily* attested each and every word tenfold - if we had only known. I hope people understand that.

As for the "why the mainspace for Volapük when other auxlangs don't have it" - yes, this is always going to happen when things are taken away piecemeal like this. But there should probably be some thought as to whether the original decision was correct, rather than rushing to line things up so that all translations for auxlangs from words in mainspace languages are equally deleted. Mithridates (talk) 17:29, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

One more thing to add: please take a look at @IJzeren Jan's proposal that constructed languages be mainspace languages as long as they have an ISO code and a Wikipedia. It's a concrete standard that can put an end to these endless discussions trying to determine whether a language belongs or not. Then the users of these languages can get back to work without the constant apprehension that exists today. It's also fairer to the users who are forced to try to determine whether an auxlang is living or not without any experience in the matter. And it still leaves room to eliminate any words that aren't sufficiently attested, so there is no danger of Wiktionary being flooded with random word that may or may not be correct. Mithridates (talk) 17:39, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

@Mithridates: Re: reddit post: If this is your post, you deliberately mis-titled it. "one user on the talk page would like to remove Esperanto as well" is blatantly false, and by the time this post was posted, it was already made clear that I rejected the removal of Esperanto and current consensus is more than for its inclusion. It reads to me as a call for Esperantists to respond with expected anger towards an issue that's not even going on, which to me is not okay at all. I understand the urgency, but urgency does not mean that disinformation should be spread.

As for the rest, note that I am not rushing, otherwise I would have set the vote up and not responded to any comments here. Also, these discussions have been going on for 6 years now. And again, no Interlingue entries were deleted to my knowledge. Translations were, yes, but those do not require nearly the same amount of effort, coming from someone who's add many in my time here. And yes, consensus does change over time, but that's how any project works.

Re: using Wikipedias/ISO codes: As I said already, we do not rely on other projects for our own criteria. This should be made abundantly clear by the current vote on personal attacks failing, along with no references mentioning Wikipedia's guidelines in our WT:CFI. In fact, we explicitly exclude cites from other Wikimedia projects counting towards WT:ATTEST for this reason. It's so much harder to delete a Wikipedia ushered in pre-LangCom, especially for conlangs due to the passionate (and honestly brigaded) debate on them. This is not something that I'm going to include in a proposal as I know that it would fail and I would not support it myself. AG202 (talk) 17:57, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

@AG202 I simply don't know how else one is supposed to read "Option to exclude all constructed languages" and "I think there should be an option to relegate all constructed languages to the appendix namespace, including Esperanto". But sure, here it is resubmitted.

> we do not rely on other projects for our own criteria

Maybe this will sound incredibly naive, but perhaps you should for this case? It is clearly taking up oodles of time and discussion and the wording is always vague. Every page is full of "generally", "community consensus", "currently", and other terms showing a clear effort towards clarity without achieving it:

> Generally, constructed languages that have amassed a critical mass of native speakers

> it's been brought up how our current CFI for mainspace constructed languages is vague and misleading. We limit languages like Toki Pona to the Appendix, but allow Volapük with a significantly smaller userbase in the mainspace. This vote hopes to alleviate that issue by limiting mainspace constructed languages to Esperanto and Eskayan, as they are the only languages with a strong community consensus for inclusion currently.

And this:

> It also gives us a direct rationale to point to versus the "this is how it's been"

But the answer "we do not rely on other projects for our own criteria" is itself a "this is how it's been", is it not?

Maybe this isn't possible, but from my point of view there is one way to do it that can be explained in a just a few words and doesn't need to be relitigated again and again.

I'm starting to repeat the same points so I guess I'll just leave it at this. Best, Mithridates (talk) 18:49, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the resubmission, thank you. The reason I use words like "generally", "currently", and the like is because this is what the project tends to agree upon. It is extraordinarily difficult here to get approval for anything, let alone such a contentious topic like this one, and very very specific proposals tend to fail unless there's universal approval ahead of time. Not that extremely vague ones are better either, which is why I tried to find a balance. Finally, there is close to 0 appetite for relying on other projects, unfortunately, and it would require such a stark culture change. AG202 (talk) 19:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

@AG202 Interesting bit about the culture change, thanks. I noticed that you consider it unfortunate, and I presume that it won't sit well with many others to remove the rest of the constructed languages. (And removing the translations does count as deletions, despite it being relatively less work to add them - I don't think it's right to try to make it look like this isn't actually deleting content)

In light of that, I would advise taking what I'd call a 'moral' stand, for lack of a better term. No removing translations for constructed languages just because the ones for Novial and Interlingue have already been removed in order to make it look like the system for deciding inclusion is working well - given the massive volume of discussions on what should belong, it's clearly not. This will show that Wiktionary is unable to decide criteria for inclusion by itself, and that it has done very little to engage with the languages that it has already deleted translations for. (e.g. not once has anyone from Wiktionary ever showed up to ask Interlingue to add sources for its words, which it could have easily done)

I think this will result in a bit more soul-searching that may lead to something deeper and more comprehensive than just shoveling non-Esperanto auxlangs into the appendix and hoping that it will solve the problem. It won't resolve the issue either as Interslavic is continuing to grow and it is very likely that the users here will have to confront that and come to yet another consensus about what is viable or not. "Native speakers? Activity? Written content? If we are going to add Interslavic, what about so-and-so other auxlang that seems a lot more active than last time we looked at it...?" and so on. The discussions will just continue in the same manner. And probably worsened by the fact that the average English Wiktionary user is probably not able to ascertain just how active Interslavic is, because it is not one of the Romance auxlangs that are relatively easy to parse. e.g. a non-slavic speaker won't be able to tell whether the language being used is actually Interslavic or just Slavic language speakers talking *about* the language.

That's my advice, anyway. Aim for a long-term culture change instead of a bit of cleanup and hoping for the best. Mithridates (talk) 03:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

I am certainly not saying that having LangCom decide is the ideal solution (although I wouldn't call it "another project"), but it is better than building a policy around something like "we want it to be such that language X is included but languages Y and Z are excluded" or "language A has to go because we don't want language B". It is poor Volapük's fault that Toki Pona and Interslavic are popular nowadays?

Any policy should be based on objective criteria and not on the desired outcome. Native speakers are indeed a possibility, but like I wrote above, in the case of auxlangs is really of questionable value. I think there are better options. For example: the language must have an ISO 639-1 code; that way, you'd keep five languages (Esperanto, Volapük, Interlingua, Ido and Interlingue) and exclude all others, including Novial, Lojban, Toki Pona and Interslavic. Or: the language must have a corpus of at least X words in durably archived texts. Or: the language must have (had) a user community of at least X people. Whatever. IJzeren Jan (talk) 19:07, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

"The language must have an ISO 639-1 code": This could be workable but would require more input from the rest of the community.

"The language must have a corpus of at least X words in durably archived texts.": Not reasonable to maintain.

"The language must have (had) a user community of at least X people": This is the same thing as the native speaker issue, if not worse, and would be up to how many people use the Toki Pona discord for example. AG202 (talk) 19:12, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Reddit is such trash. I'm glad one person at least actually quoted one of the comments I made. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:50, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I strongly agree with a lot of what Jan says, and think the rationales that have been given against most of our mainspace constructed languages are flimsy. The constructed languages we currently have in the mainspace are by and large those that have had substantial bodies of CFI-satisfying literature published in them; they are precisely those languages which we probably could treat as WDLs and not lose most of their entries. To my mind, this criterion much better matches the status quo of community practice up to this point, and is also more in keeping with our broader inclusion criteria as a whole, than the proposed changes. The requirement for native speakers, by contrast, raises a whole host of questions and problems. (Were there ever native speakers of Old Church Slavonic, for instance? By many definitions of OCS, the answer is no.) If we want to revise and clarify our inclusion criteria for mainspace constructed languages, I do not think the ones proposed in this vote are the way to go about it. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 00:08, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

OCS isn’t under the purview of this vote, as it’s not a constructed language. Otherwise it’d be in the Appendix right now. Again, this vote aligns with a majority of folks who’ve participated in these discussions in the past. If this vote fails in the end, so be it, but there’s a clear want for it. AG202 (talk) 00:43, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

What makes you think that OCS is not a constructed language? Several prominent Slavists would disagree with that point of view. In any case, it fulfils every part of the definition of a constructed language: we know by whom it was created, when it was created, who commissioned it, for what purpose it was created, and which languages it was based on. In addition, it never had native speakers, it served as a written language long before it was ever spoken, and Sts. Cyril and Method even invented an alphabet for it. At the very best, it belongs to a grey zone between natural and constructed languages. IJzeren Jan (talk) 17:43, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

As mentioned in the BP discussion, standardized/koine versions of a language are not considered artificial languages or constructed languages by our definitions, nor by the definition used by Wikipedia. Otherwise, Swahili, standard Yoruba, Unified Kichwa, etc. etc. would not be in the mainspace. This has been established precedent since the beginning of this website. CC: @Benwing2, @-sche AG202 (talk) 17:49, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable, but in that case maybe that should be clarified in the CFI text: "Constructed languages have not developed naturally, but are the product of conscious effort in the fulfillment of some purpose" doesn't clearly exclude standardized forms of existing languages.--Urszag (talk) 09:22, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd appreciate any suggestions for how to reword that text. AG202 (talk) 15:06, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I'll also mention this comment from User:Thadh:

When we record languages like Latin or Old Church Slavonic, we don't simply record the written language, but we simultaneously record the spoken language associated with it: Vulgar Latin and Pre-Bulgaro-Macedonian. For auxlangs, you don't have a natural counterpart that is recorded together with the written one.

From Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2024/May § Interslavic language AG202 (talk) 15:28, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Just noting here that I also intend to oppose this vote as it stands. I simply don't understand why Wiktionarians have traditionally had such a strong prejudice against constructed languages. I feel that it would be useful for a user who has been active on this project for a long time to write down a good rationale for this vote. The arguments made by AG202 above are mainly appeals to Wiktionary policy and community practice, which are valuable in an RFV/RFD discussion, but are not especially enlightening when the fundamental question is why these policies and practices have developed this way. This, that and the other (talk) 11:44, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

@This, that and the other: I'm not sure why the policies developed in this way, but as recently mentioned, the languages have been there close to the inception of CFI, so if anything it feels like they've been maintained for precedent's sake. However, part of the reason why this proposal was created was that we keep getting BP threads about Interslavic and other conlangs and why they're relegated to the Appendix namespace while conlangs like Volapük remain in the mainspace. Proposal 1 at least gives us some criteria that we can actually point to, versus the "this is how it's been" rationale that keeps being brought up. AG202 (talk) 15:22, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I believe that any constructed language where a good chunk (at least 50%) of its lemmas have three independent uses can go into the mainspace, while any language that passes the WT:LDL criteria can go into the appendix. The three languages that AG202 points out as not having enough quotes in their entries could have a majority of their entries pass CFI, but no one's cared enough to do that. I'll put random entries from the languages into RFV, and see what happens. CitationsFreak (talk) 20:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

(Also, revivals of languages/language families should not be considered conlangs if they are used.) CitationsFreak (talk) 20:18, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Eskayan

I wonder, as far a proposal 1 is concerned, whether it is technically correct/demonstrable to say that Eskayan has "a critical mass of native speakers". (I also wonder whether people will vote against the vagueness of "critical mass", even though I understand that setting any specific number will also invite opposition, and we'll have problems with people claiming there's a native speaker of Volapuk whose religion is Jedi, see here, his self-reported census data says so, etc.) Eskayan has a community of speakers, an actual community of people who live together in villages and use it in their lives, and teach it to their children in schools, but it can unfortunately be debated whether this counts as making the child "native [from birth]" speakers, sensu stricto. If these proposals don't pass, I suspect it might be prudent to vote on just "add Eskayan to the list" (without that being bundled with removing anything). - -sche (discuss) 20:56, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

@-sche: Thanks, I'll likely make a separate vote for it. The only thing I'm hesitating about is whether or not it should be added to WT:WDL. AG202 (talk) 15:37, 8 June 2024 (UTC)