This is response to Oliver, as well.
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:30 PM, Karen Broome klbroome@pacbell.net wrote:
I agree that pressuring the JAC to adopt a less offensive code is futile. There are national libraries and government-funded software systems that use these codes that cannot be updated in any kind of timely way. Lots of countries would like representations that more closely resemble the native language names. I can’t remember the issue, but I have been up against something like this before and gave up, as interop and compatibility with legacy systems was paramount. 639-2 codes are not likely to change for that reason.
Here is the background of the story...
This is not about "closer representation", but about replacing the code based on *offensive* language name. Replacing code names because of more trivial (and racist reasons, BTW) have happened in at least in the case of ROM=>RON change. (Poor Romanians were offended because the code had a meaning of a member of Roma ethnicity.) Allowing a racist-based change requested by white people and not allowing offensive-name-based change by indigenous people is a typical institutional racist behavior, no matter of particular excuse
I know there are always pretty valid excuses as long as it's not about interests and money of white people. We could, for example, see that in relation to not fixing many scripts inside of Unicode because of "reasons", while adding tons of nonsense emoticons afterwards because "it's cool".
It is not about ISO 639-2, but about ISO 639-3. We are using ISO 639-3 codes. If there is the rule which fixes ISO 639-3 to ISO 639-2, that's definitely unfortunate and requires changes of the rules inside of JAC to avoid widespread institutional racism.
A note to Oliver: First, thank you for really reading the document and finding the relevant part.
At the other side, can we or not JAC's and Unicode's behavior put under the definition "The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."?
If *you* think not, please send me a private email with the reasons. I would be happy to be convinced by you in opposite and will apologize here. If convinced, will do that partially for JAC, as well, because I think that it's not possible to defend Unicode's institutional racism.
I also think allowing a particular organization to take ownership of a wiki might result in more politicized wikis. Seems like a good idea, but might come back to haunt us. Did a particular request prompt this?
It's not about ownership and it is about Wikimedia chapters or closely affiliated organization. It is about making organizational efforts to make people working on particular Wikimedia projects. For example, Wikimedia Australia is organizing editathons among particular indigenous ethnic group and they have in their yearly budget money reserved for outreach to that group.
Which spreadsheet — the table of group members or something else?
It's a working spreadsheet. I am not sure if you have write permissions, but you could see it by clicking here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1km84QEg4MIbeWekZ4qZVibQ37pX3sd4p8qHS...
You could just write here, via email, what you can do in LangCom. You could see that it's about various responses.