Ha, I got notification e-mails of the Talk page I supscribed to many years ago. :-)  Great initiative!

I do agree the current Colemak section has grown too large and deserves its own article again.  And yes, Colemak is certainly more mainstream than it was back then.  I would advise to keep any additional content in a full article factual, like history of the layout etc.  If we go overboard on all possible mods and variants (many of which are not Colemak specific, like Curl, Wide, Extend etc), it may scare newcomers away, and risk being considered "original research".  Remember Wikipedia is about facts and not advocacy.

Regarding notability references: back then, I added references to Colemak being included in several OS'es to support the notability case. But maybe they are not that relevant anymore today, what do you think?

So glad to see interest in this - the reason I reached out is because I'm fairly new to the layout myself and could never hope to include as much information as you guys would.

Bang on the money there - I was even considering mentioning how I wasn't intending some 'advocacy thing' in my original post. People have their own opinions about what Wikipedia should and shouldn't include but I generally think current policy is right. The fact Colemak was removed a while ago, at least from a Wikipedian point of view was right. But clearly things have changed since then, writing an article would no longer be to promote some fringe thing that nobody has heard about but rather something that is clearly worthy of proper coverage.

Factual knowledge of the layout isn't something I have in spades (I've only been using it for under a week! :D) so I really do invite as many people to go and change the article right now and get it up to the minimum quantity for it's own article - then it can be published and developed for time to come.

In the current draft I trimmed it down in the lead section to only mention the more mainstream OSes (the furthest I go is 'BSD') - the Dvorak article goes into excruciating detail about it's avaliabilty on OSes (seen here) so the balance would be mention mainstream OSes in the lead section and go into full detail later down the line (another reason why a separate article is needed, I noticed the detail in the subsection!). Notability per the guideline is

so the fact it's included in many OSes isn't demonstation of notability by itself - but the sustained third-party interest and articles on Colemak is and so the notability case is made. Outside of the policy though, the fact it's included in MacOS for example definitely strengthens the case for its own article.

Totally! Any first party sources from Shai, even from this forum would definitely be appropriate.

ModDH and Tarmak are to be two very popular variants of Colemak and should be included. But too much detail (Curl, Wide, Extend etc) like ghen said is definitely extraneous detail and not directly related to Colemak, but rather spinoffs of what this community uses. Gotta find a balance!

I don't know much about international wikis, maybe they've always been more inclusionist when it comes to articles. But there shouldn't be different standards across wikis! Clearly the case for a standalone article is very good - and it should go live as soon as there's more meat on the draft that's there at the moment. Actually, I really should just submit it now come to think of it. It's notable with scope for improvement and does not omit any information already available. Any searches will go straight to Colemak anyway. And we get the nice summary box next to Google searches, a huge plus. I'll do that now.

EDIT: Instead I've pulled the page from the slow process of AFC that would likely get us nowhere. I'll try and get an admin to move the article into mainspace on the basis of notability and not on content currently present, on the basis there's room for improvement.

Totally. If information about those mods were to be included it would be Computer keyboard but it's probably best to leave it out for now as I can't seem to find any third-party articles mentioning much about them - we need to be careful not to fall into WP:Promotion.

Unless these mods get mentioned in third party articles as much as Colemak default gets mentioned, the most inclusion should be a brief mention of the Mod-DH layout and not much more. The fact that the variants themselves exist is worthy of inclusion as they're related to Colemak and used by enough people, but jargon related to mods and too much divergence detracts from the original subject of the article: Colemak. It's sucky, especially since you've created these layouts and would like to see them mentioned in greater detail, but the rabbit hole can run deep and there need to be limits on what can be included:  WP:WEIGHT is a good summary. Maybe in the distant future where Colemak is the second most popular layout, it and Mod-DH are supported out of the box on all OSes, there can be a whole section for variants like this one on the Dvorak page!

Not trying to be obtuse about it, as I don't really care what people call it, and I'm not claiming that "Mod-DH" is the best name ever...  but...  Mod-DH was the original, "official" name given to it at its creation, so I think that should be preferred.

I think "Curl" is the name of a generic mod for de-emphasizing the middle-row centre-column keys. For example, you could apply a Curl mod to Dvorak if you wanted.
Mod-DH is the specific layout that results from applying a particular Curl mod to Colemak.

Strangely enough, I do not like the name Curl for aesthetical reasons too. Looks like we have different aesthetic :). “Something happened to DH” IMO is the main idea of the modification, this is what it has different with Colemak where 10 most frequent letters are all put in the home row. I guess if humans would have 6 fingers that would be justified.
Also, for me letters “A” and “W” from “CAW” just went away together with left behind standard keyboard and I regret about that as much as about left behind qwerty.

Cheers! Notability isn't determined on whether there is an article on a topic at a given moment, rather on how many sources independent on the topic exist. So it's been notable for some years now - it just needed a little shove to have a standalone article made. This is in stark contrast to this thread on here written ten years ago - it's written as if we're going to war with Wikipedia or something. The prospects of the article's existence instead has naturally gained over time as people over the years in the media and online have written about it. It was a long time coming!

Advocacy and biased, unsourced editing is something I (and I hope most people here) would never agree with for this article. But right now it is in its early days and there is much room for good improvement. A wholesome and well written article is some of the best and fair advocacy our community can hope for! As well as some new separate, horrendously biased third party blogs circlejerking how great and amazing alternate layouts are. But not for the wiki article! :)

That was tongue-in-cheek of course. :-)

I added the reference from the Keyboard layout section to the main Colemak article.
And linked it together with the other Colemak articles on international Wikipedias as well.