Should we allow people to nominate their own language for Language of the Month?

Question

In a comment on the Language of the Month nominations thread, Peter Taylor raised a valid point:

It might be worth prohibiting nominations of your own language. If a language is genuinely interesting, it should be possible to find someone else who's willing to advocate it; and if you can't find anyone else to advocate it, you're going to be a bottleneck to answering questions in chat etc.

As of this writing, the comment has four upvotes, which indicates to me that several people think prohibiting self-nominations may be a good thing.

On the other hand, when I brought up the issue in chat, some people argued against such a ban:

I'm totally fine with allowing self-nominations. The whole point of voting is to filter out what's actually good.

Destructible Lemon made a salient point:

I'd like to comment that the thing was designed to help people raise awareness of their languages and stuff, not to have a language appreciation club or something

So, what do you think? To self-nominate, or not to self-nominate?

_{If we decide we don't want self-nominations, I propose that this rule apply only to future nominations. Existing nominations should be allowed to stay.}

Answer 1

Yes:

The intention of the language of the month was to generate interest in obscure languages made by ppcg users

Whereas, many of us are the inventors of said interesting languages, and would like to teach them to others, and

from the original proposal (emphasis mine)

If we don't allow self nominations, it means that the (possibly high quality) languages that need help will all languish in author-only-use, which could be argued to be the very reason the language of the month was proposed, or why it was supported.

Answer 2

Also Yes:

Nothing wrong with the other answer, but I would like to propose an alternate change rather than no change.

I think self-nomination is valid and well within the spirit of the event. The goal (seems to be) to get exposure to interesting but not-well-known languages, and having a proposal written by a person who (presumably) knows the language best and has the most interest in it seems like a valid way to showcase key features. I think at least part of the problem originated from a particular answer (which seems to have been deleted, so I won't name names) which featured a language which was essentially still in development.

So, instead of considering "maybe the creator is biased and will nominate a bad language", which has a lot of fallout, simply add two requirements:

1. The language should have a stable implementation available.
2. The language should have useful documentation for said implementation.

The phrasing could probably use some more precision, but I think these rules should avoid problems of languages that change/replace/remove features, creating an unstable golfing environment, as well as having an alternate resource for answering questions than just the creator. If making these hard rules is too restrictive, I think they're at least good metrics for evaluating proposals (e.g. "it's hard to pick up this language from just the documentation, so I don't think it's a good option").