2007/9/11, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>om>:
The problem is that we use international standards of language content
codes to classify Wikipedias by language.
Occasionally, there is a language variety which spans several of them,
has none at all, or there may be several very distinct varieties
within one code which require separate Wikipedias.
Unfortunately, the current procedure of the Langcom seems to be to
require anyone whose Wiki does not fit neatly into one of the holes
carved by the IANA to request a new code from the IANA itself. I do
not disagree with that 100%, after all if we are making up our own
codes avante-gard, then our content cannot be processed by external
sources according to language (search engines, for example). I also
have objections to it however, but I am sure that by now these are
obvious if you do not already know what they are (it limits legitimate
varieties from getting their own Wiki in a relatively timely fashion,
and discriminates against non-European languages although that is
unintentional, they are just less well-documented in general).
Thankfully, I think, the Langcom does not seek to or does not have the
power (?) to close or rename existing Wikis, so "wrong" codes like sc
and the like which are actually "macrolanguage codes" will not be
closed in the interim.
It'a a problem of Langcom, but Langom could change his "actions"
Unfortunately the current international standards are very flawed.
However, we cannot expect them to be perfect in a
world where we have
thousands of languages and many people disagree on what should be
considered a language.
It is an imperfect standard, but it is the best that is currently
available, so if you discover a problem in it (a language is missing,
or a language is divided into too many parts), it is probably best, as
Gerard suggested, to submit a correction, but be prepared to back it
up with lots of documentation... to get a new code (I believe), there
must be at least 50 books existing in a language, which could be a lot
to ask for some languages, and obviously was not used as a requirement
for when codes were "imported" from Ethnologue.
However, as far as Sardinian goes, rather than combining Logudorese
and Campidanese into a single entity and merging Gallurese and
Sassarese into Corsican, I think it is best to add a code for
something written in one of the several unified varieties of
Sardinian, if not specifically LSC (for example its predecessor LSU,
or the amateur creation Limba de Messania), because it may still
sometimes be necessary to maintain parallel translations of a document
in each variety, and also because Gallurese and _especially_ Sassarese
are not usually accepted by Corsicans as pure "Corsican" and would
probably not be allowed on the Corsican Wikipedia.
Mark
We're talking about linguistics relevance of a language, not politics