To close this thread:
The current proposal says to give Z1001-Z1006 to the big six UN languages,
and then to assign Z1011ff. to all the other language codes based on the
alphabetical order of their language codes.
I was wondering if, for the languages not in the big six, instead of using
the alphabetical order, if there was an appetite to using a randomized
order
Advantages of alphabetical order: it enables a bit of guessing and
remembering (if you know what "uz" is, you'll be able to guess
"uz-cyrl"
and "uz-latn" with quite some confidence).
Advantages of random order: no special weight to latin script and
latinized names of languages.
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 3:51 PM Denny Vrandečić <dvrandecic(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Thanks for the thoughts, these are super useful!
And yes, I sent that
mail yesterday out with not enough context.
Thad, thanks, LCID looks indeed very interesting! That could provide a
source of numbers to draw from. But looking into it in detail, it also
looks like "we took the English language names, and in that order assigned
numbers, until we finished the first batch, and then added more batches
chronologically". So at least there's precedent for doing that.
Lucas, I was also thinking about QIDs. But besides the point that David
raised, or rather in addition to them, there's also the point that Wikidata
should be the 'pure representation' of what a language is - whereas the
objects in Wikifunctions representing languages should malleable to exactly
what we need and want them to be, irrelevant of their
independent ontological status in the world (I hope that makes sense?). In
Wikifunctions we decide what a language is, and their fallbacks, etc.,
based on product needs. In Wikidata on the other side we decide what is a
language and what is not based on what relevant sources are stating. These
hopefully overlap, and ideally are equivalent, but in reality I don't
expect them to be and I don't want to introduce a push for edits in
Wikidata to make certain features in Wikifunctions work.
Yes, we should have mappings from the relevant ZIDs to QIDs, and/or the
other way around, but that's why I think they shouldn't be the same.
Charles, regarding your point, yes, we should be compatible and map to
external standards as much as possible, but for the same reason as to
regarding Wikidata, we shouldn't simply import them wholesale.
I wrote down a few more thoughts on-wiki here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Representation_of_langua…
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 5:44 AM Charles Matthews via Abstract-Wikipedia <
abstract-wikipedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 11 March 2021 at 12:24 David Abián
<davidabian(a)wikimedia.es> wrote:
Hi,
Although we usually claim that Wikidata entities and their URIs are
stable, I believe that, unfortunately, their stability isn't as high as
desirable in practice, or at least the risk of deletion, merging,
redirection, redefinition of identity due to confusion or ambiguity,
etc. exists and materializes too often (I hope I'm not being read by
Wikidata haters :D). This happens with all kinds of Items, and it can
happen with minority languages as well as with something as widespread
as, for instance, Chinese.
On 11/03/2021 09:50, Lucas Werkmeister wrote:
> Wouldn’t it be better to refer to them using Wikidata item IDs?
Not an area where I'm an expert. But there seem to be quite a number of
standard IDs for languages, include some which are ISO, and P424 on
Wikidata which is "Wikimedia language code".
I would say the default solution would be Z-numbers, and a Wikidata
property for WA ID so that cross-walking to any other standard ID is just a
Wikidata query away. If what is intended is an exact fit with P424 then
that would be duplication; but I suppose in the end that won't be the
decision.
Charles
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