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.
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.
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?
-- ++SJ