[Foundation-l] Community draft of language proposal policy

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
On Meta you replaced the ISO-639-3 requirement with an RFC 4646 requirement.
These  things are incompatible. From a language point of view one, the ISO
code is about languages the other is not. So when you say that we can be
ahead of the game, you should not go backwards to the RFC and consider this
"best practice" indeed a best practice. For us it is not. It does not even
address the issues that we deal with as the RFC does occupy itself with
dialects and orthographies something that we explicitly do not.

Yes, we have been ahead of the standards bodies, we adopted the ISO-639-3
before it was confirmed as a standard. I am involved in the ISO-639-6 and
this is at least five years ahead to what would be considered a BCP.  The
issue is in what makes sense; when people want to write in a dead language,
they are welcome to it. HOWEVER, it has to be clear that what is written in
a modern incarnation of a dead language is not the dead language itself.
>From my point of view this acknowledgment is best practice, but people are
loath to agree that modern texts in a dead language is not the dead language
itself.
Thanks,
        GerardM

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > The IETF has been involved in incorporating the ISO-639-3 for over a year
> > since the moment this version of the standard became official. The new
> > proposed RFC will be the RFC 4646-bis. Many languages that we recognise
> in
> > the Wikimedia Foundation are not recognised in the RFC 4646. It is
> exactly
> > because of this standard being behind the time that we use the ISO-639-3.
>
> You are making a requirement that a language proposal must have a *unique*
> ISO 639-3 code. That is much more restrictive than what I am suggesting.
> I'm saying that we shouldn't need a unique language code of any kind. All
> we need is a domain name and something to put in the lang attribute. As
> far as I'm concerned, the lang attribute can be "und", and the domain name
> can be a 7-letter transliteration. Both can be changed at any time after
> the creation of the project.
>
> We've been ahead of the standards bodies in the past, and we've moved
> wikis when they've caught up. I see no reason why we can't do it again.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
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