[Insignificance of success or success of insignificance: the example of some European projects for languages] Lingua projects, like all European projects, are evaluated on internal criteria: whether they are successful or not is determined by conformity to specifications carefully spelled out in the project. But are such criteria enough? It has been noted that some Lingua projects are sliding into triviality. It is clear that internal evaluation alone cannot fix the problem: a trivial project may well perfectly meet the evaluation criteria and so be deemed a success. Projects have to be considered from a more general point of view. They necessarily imply goals and policies, and these goals and policies can be explicit or implicit, well or ill-conceived, ethically correct or not, bona fide or dishonest, and so on. Social and economic impact of language policies should also be taken into account, and this means that evaluation is not as straightforward as it seems.