Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Simple German 4

submitted	verification	final decision

	This proposal has been rejected. This decision was taken by the language committee in accordance with the Language proposal policy based on the discussion on this page. A committee member provided the following comment: See closing comments below. For LangCom: StevenJ81 (talk) 13:50, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The community needs to develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval (automated statistics, recent changes). It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.
The community needs to complete required MediaWiki interface translations in that language (about localization, translatewiki, check completion).
The community needs to discuss and complete the settings table below:

What	Value	Example / Explanation

Proposal
Language code	de-simple (SIL, Glottolog)	A valid ISO 639-1 or 639-3 language code, like "fr", "de", "nso", ...
Language name	simple German	Language name in English
Language name	German	Language name in your language. This will appear in the language list on Special:Preferences, in the interwiki sidebar on other wikis, ...
Language Wikidata item	NA	Item about the language at Wikidata. It would normally include the Wikimedia language code, name of the language, etc. Please complete at Wikidata if needed.
Directionality	no indication	Is the language written from left to right (LTR) or from right to left (RTL)?
Links		Links to previous requests, or references to external websites or documents.
Site URL	de-simple.wikipedia.org	langcode.wikiproject.org

Settings
Project name	Wikipedia	"Wikipedia" in your language
Project namespace		usually the same as the project name
Project talk namespace		"Wikipedia talk" (the discussion namespace of the project namespace)
Enable uploads	yes	Default is "no". Preferably, files should be uploaded to Commons. If you want, you can enable local file uploading, either by any user ("yes") or by administrators only ("admin"). Notes: (1) This setting can be changed afterwards. The setting can only be "yes" or "admin" at approval if the test creates an Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) first. (2) Files on Commons can be used on all Wikis. (3) Uploading fair-use images is not allowed on Commons (more info). (4) Localisation to your language may be insufficient on Commons.
Optional settings
Project logo		This needs to be an SVG image (instructions for logo creation).
Default project timezone		"Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces		For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings		Anything else that should be set
Once settings are finalized, a committee member will submit a Phabricator task requesting creation of the wiki. (This will include everything automatically, except the additional namespaces/settings.) After the task is created, it should be linked to in a comment under "final decision" above.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Die Deutsche Wikipedia ist die zweitgrösste überhaupt und deutsch ist wie vielen bekannt ist eine sehr schwere Sprache.

Also möchte ich eine Wikipedia Version mit erstellen die auch Leuten die am Deutsch lernen sind.

Arguments in favour

As the second largest wikipedia I believe there's an excellent opportunity for those not fluent in German if a simple German wiki is created. I know I'd use it. 194.62.210.50 13:48, 22 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. I only know basic German. --Horrifico (talk) 23:14, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly agree. I'm from Germany and Wikipedia really looses views because of the complicated language of many articles. It would be a real advantage to have a wiki with more understandable terms next to the original. --Flo998 (talk) 17:13, 19 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly support this. German is a popular language; having a Simple German Wikipedia would allow for those still learning German or who just aren't fluent in it to be able to contribute. I for one would contribute to a Simple German Wikipedia. I know German to an extent, but not to the extent where I'd be able to actively contribute to de.wiki. --GeorgeBarnick (talk) 16:45, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The No. 1 thing that would help is finding a standardized simple form of the language. If you find it, it would be very helpful WhisperToMe (talk) 09:33, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Like the "Simple English" Wikipedia, Simple German is especially for the handicapped, disabled, and illiterate persons and also helpful for migrants. Ready to use rules and standards are still elaborated by University of Hildesheim --Nanimo5 (talk) 21:54, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I was always wondering, why only english (as a quite simple language to learn compared to others) have a simple language wikipedia. German is widely spoken, the normal german wikipedia has a great quality (maybe also reference to the current structure of articles, you can't just bot-create "Person" articles, but for sure Taxon- or Places-articles [1]) compared to other wikipedias and nearly 2 million articles. It would be great to have a simple german wikipedia, especially if the normal german articles have got very complex. --Fundriver (talk) 13:02, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

English is actually considered one of the hardest languages to learn because of its many complicated rules and exceptions etc. -Djsasso (talk) 18:29, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

source? Fundriver (talk) 06:58, 14 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Even as a native german, who speaks the language fluetently, would really enjoy a german version of Simple Wikipedia. The simple isn't just about the language, it's also about the length. A 20 page article is very complicated and difficult to use for research for a short school presentation, so Simple Wikipedia is very usefull for that purpose. For now I have to use the English simple wikipedia and translate everything :/. 17.53, 18 January 2017 UTC
support Gdog1102 (talk) 22:37, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
"Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute". This Wikipedia's pillar summarizes the main point of the work being done here. If the community's idea is to provide accessible knowledge, it should also try and produce simple articles for German's speakers who hadn't the opportunity to learn the language too well. Of course, this is not feasible for smaller languages, but German being the second main one in Wikipedia raises the necessity of having simple German, primarily when English has that version. Xetado (talk) 23:23, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Arguments against

Oppose - Failed 1, failed 2 & failed 3. Policy now does not allow for more simple projects. -- Dferg ^{☎ talk} 16:15, 21 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Note that we in the language committee have been discussing about it and it may be allowed in the future (under conditions). SPQRobin (talk) 19:47, 1 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  - Comment: On June 20, 2011 there is a mailing list released which said that simple languages are allowed. However for German you will need to find a standardized "simple" form compared to en:Basic English in English or fr:Français fondamental in French WhisperToMe (talk) 05:43, 3 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    - @WhisperToMe: Then how do you explain the rejection of Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Simple Hebrew? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:55, 3 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      - @Liuxinyu970226: I did see the closer of the Hebrew page, User:StevenJ81, say "In general, policy no longer allows new "Simple" projects. If there is an interest, this should be created within Hebrew Wikipedia." Perhaps this can be reconciled: The 2011 mailing list article stated that "the language should be a "world language" with many L2 users, and there must be a reliable, published specification of the controlled language to be used." My understanding is that Hebrew is not considered to be a major world language while French and German are. In addition the proposer of the Hebrew project did not supply a "reliable, published specification of the controlled language" while French, for example, has en:francais fondamental.WhisperToMe (talk) 13:09, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Other discussion

What language code would be used by this project? Kaldari 20:06, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe depends on result of Requests for new languages/Wikipedia French Simple 3. πr² (t • c) 23:56, 5 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm inclined to tentatively support this proposal, because although English is a dominant lingua franca, German is also interesting linguistically speaking as it is a close cousin of English. It might prove useful to translators and "German as Second Language" learners yet. However, the simple projects have also been discouraged historically and LangCom's support since the last request has been quite unclear. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 22:18, 19 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It might help to read this post by a Langcom member. Is there a published form of simplified German? WhisperToMe (talk) 14:01, 19 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there is a published form of simplified German by the University of Hildesheim. Some rules were published [2], but they compiled some more rules and built a whole system for writing proper texts in simple German. --Nanimo5 (talk) 19:02, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Alternate proposal I'd suggest adding "Simple" versions of articles as a tab or a drop-down option within the main encyclopedia itself. I don't think that creating a separate project will be as useful. Cf. Wikipedias_in_multiple_writing_systems such as Serbian, where you can choose between Cyrillic and Latin encodings of the language. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:56, 11 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think adding a drop down with the article "level" makes sense at this point of time. I have added a request here. Please add your votes --Zukunft (talk) 08:04, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Automatic Text Simplification Research (2015)

Hello, I am a researcher from University of Pennsylvania. Many researchers including me in the field of computational linguistics (computer science + linguistics, a branch of artificial intelligence) actually create softwares to automatically simplifies sentences (reference). And one of the most important dataset needed to train such computer models is actually Simple English Wikipedia. It is a very active research area and becomes more and more popular since Simple English Wikipedia is available in 2010. It would be *really* great if Wikipedia is available in more other "Simple" languages. Although it is hard to adhere to a certain guideline or have a clear definition of "Simple" language, we can actually have computer programs to figure it out if there are enough data available. - xuwei912 (talk) 05:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Alternate wiki

we should expand and support exist projects like hurraki (hurraki.de for German). It is also OER. --70.70.141.24 22:51, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

people who have problems in understanding complicate German texts will never find hurraki online, especially when everyone around them is talking about great wikipedia. so they will look first at wikipedia to find information. --Nanimo5 (talk) 18:57, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Closing comments

By current policy:

In general, we are no longer approving new simple projects of any type.
We strongly encourage existing projects to make provisions to include simple content.
If there is a community that remains strongly interested in doing a Simple German project, please contact me on my talk page, and I will make some suggestions.

StevenJ81 (talk) 13:50, 14 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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