On 11/26/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/25/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
This is exactly the policy we adopted several years ago, which has
proved
insufficient.
Relying on existence of ISO codes brings us:
- split Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian replacing Serbocroatian
[controverial]
- Klingon
Another issue is, that we've already created wikipedias in most ISO 639-1 languages. So those that remain are by definition somewhat difficult.
There are nice tables for converting ISO-639-1 to ISO-639-2. The upcoming ISO-639-3 code is like the ISO-639-2 in three characters and there will be no conversion. However some codes will be removed and replaced by others. For your information, in Ultimate Wiktionary we will have a table with the ISO-639-3 codes but for convenience sake we have room for the ISO-639-1 codes. In order to make it more simple, we will have a field where we store the name that the WMF uses.
and denies various languages/dialects/whatever which don't have their
own codes
but which are oft asked for.
Should it be possible for language enthusiasts to pitch to Wikipedia directly, rather than to some third-party language-centered org that WP truts and works with? If it were not possible to pitch directly to WM (say, acceptance by such a third-party group is a pre-req to applying for a lang-project), this would help avoid subsets of the world's language zealots engaging in subsets of global debates on WM mailing lists.
As Ultimate Wiktionary, aims to have all words in all languages, words particular to dialects are certainly welcome. This will allow us to have words in Westfries, spoken in the region where I was born, once a language but now not more than a dialect of the Dutch language.. :)
The only problem is that the list of ISO codes is highly politicized and
broken in many many ways. It was fine for getting a list of things like "English" and "German" and "French" and so on, but it breaks down when
Who are the target audiences for a new and improved list of codes? language-enthusiast editors? readers? third-party content developers/aggregators? linguists? translators? educators? If some of these audiences will have to do more work and others less, which should get priority?
By creating "the" list of languages, you remove the discussion from the argument "is this a language or not". This removes the need from creating your own list and it is important because as we know it can be an endless struggle. Even when there is a language known on the list and there are people denying the validity and there are always more languages to consider. Being on the list is important when you care for a language. The audience ? All of the above. However for organisations like ours it does not free us from having the argument anyway. We have people that insist on a fixed orthography, a literature or an army to have the argument going their way.
I would like us to be relaxed about it. Let us have the projects in the languages that are requested, in the end the proof of the pudding is in the eating, when a project is a success, it is a reason to rejoice.
Thanks, GerardM