On 11/25/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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