I was wondering about this earlier (though in the context of programming languages for code implementations, rather than natural languages): why do we need to assign them to ZIDs at all? Wouldn’t it be better to refer to them using Wikidata item IDs?

Cheers,
Lucas

How would you assign languages to ZIDs?

Currently the idea is to reserve the four digit ZIDs for languages.

I would like to start with the languages that are user interface languages for MediaWiki (but there's enough space to extend this considerably later).

But how to turn them into numbers?

The best way I can come up with is to take the language codes, sort them alphabetically, and take that for the first set, and then, when more come in, add them chronologically. Let's have that as the strawman proposal, but maybe someone can come up with a smarter idea?

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