A proposal for a Stack Overflow in Arabic was just closed with a message referring the creator to a five year old post which refers the reader to another post mentioning (from Tim Post ♦) that the creation of new localized Stack Overflow sites in other languages was on hold:
After Spanish, it's going to be a bit of time before we're ready to take on another language. I can't say precisely how long other than much longer than I'm comfortable asking people to wait, while the Area 51 process itself continues to raise people's expectations.
It's been five years since that post (arguably quite more than "a bit of time"), and I haven't heard anything except that all proposals for non-English Stack Overflow sites have been summarily closed.
What's the status of localized Stack Overflow variants? Is this something that is going to restart soon as the company recovers from the debacle of last year? Is there a specific set of conditions that must be met (e.g. new localization can only happen after all current non-English sites have had less than 2% spam posts for a period of six months, and the company's financial statements must meet the requirements on the following attached rubric....)? Does "a bit of time" actually mean "go away"?
To be clear, I don't currently have the required community to propose a localized, non-English site, and the purpose of this question is not to get help finding such a community. My question is really whether it is even worth it to go out on my own and try to gather a community in preparation for the reopening of localized proposals, or whether Stack Exchange is really telling us that this is unlikely to ever be possible again.
