Hi Joe, Magnus, Andrew, GerardM, Jane, Daniel and Wikidatans, 

Since "Language fallback is not a luxury like it is for British English, it is essential for all the smaller languages. It is what prevents it from being editable / usable" (per GerardM), and in terms of Reasonator, statements, and careful design (DanielK), what are current Wikidata processes to plan eventually for all 7,106 living languages (plus even dead and invented languages) in the world per "Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition" (http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size), as people add them, and use, for example, the ISO coding system (or similar) for this, to anticipate not yet added languages, and especially for 'smaller' languages that GerardM mentions?

In terms of British English (en-gb) and English (en) distinction, why not just code English in Wikidata as "ISO 639-3eng" per http://www.ethnologue.com/language/eng as part of a careful design for all languages, and then build out for smaller languages? (CC wiki WUaS is planning wiki schools in all 7,106 languages, plus dead and invented languages). 

It seems that using or keying in on the ISO system, or a similar one, would allow for remarkable extensibility and careful design of Wikidata, as well as fallback for other languages such as Hindi, Odia or Malayalam. 

Cheers, 

Scott

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

Hoi,

I am talking about statements.. I am not asking for selecting items that have no label in a language.. This would only work if auto descriptions are in use.
Thanks,

     GerardM

On 5 May 2014 12:52, Daniel Kinzler <daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de> wrote:

Am 05.05.2014 10:57, schrieb Gerard Meijssen:

> Hoi,
> When the "other languages" box needs to become more flexible, it is a different
> problem that has nothing to do with the ability to understand what statements
> are made. At this time it is an absolute inability when there is no label in
> *YOUR* language.

You are talking about picking an item as a link target when creating a statement
when tehre is no label for the target item in your exact variant?

Yes, we can and should implement fallback for that more swiftly. In fact, I was
under the impression this was already in place... Lydia, do we have ticket for that?

-- daniel

PS: it's not an *absolute* inability: you can enter the ID directly. But that's
not very nice, I know.

--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer

Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

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- http://scottmacleod.com/interlingual/worlduniversityandschool.html

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