But what about the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia!?!?!!??!!!?
Anyhow, what flag should we use for French? The flag of France? That is very discriminatory. French is the first language of Quebec, and the only official language of plenty of countries on multiple continents (though mostly in Africa).
What about Portuguese? Or Spanish? Or English?
What about Chinese? Taiwanese people will be very offended by the communist flag, and displaying the nationalist flag might even get us blocked by Chinese proxies, not to mention the fact that it is also the official language in Singapore.
What about Hindi? The Indian flag is a bit offensive because that implies that Hindi is *the* language of the union, which it is not. It also excludes Fijian speakers of Hindi.
What about Dutch? The Netherlands, Belgium, Surinam, and a couple of other places speak Dutch.
What about German? or Arabic?
Mark
On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 22:57:01 +0000, Arwel Parry arwel@cartref.demon.co.uk wrote:
In message 20050109155648.GI21075@thingy.apana.org.au, David Gerard fun-e016Bj8cE8tLBo1qDEOMRrpzq4S04n8Q@public.gmane.org writes
Anthere (anthere9-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org) [050109 18:05]:
Mark Williamson a écrit:
One prediction I have is that somebody will suggest adding flags to make it easier to choose languages. This is a BAD idea because there are speakers of French in Japan, speakers of Thai in Malta, speakers of Catalan in Greece, etc; also some languages are indigenous to more than one country, or they don't have a corresponding flag (for diaspora languages such as Yiddish and Ladino), or it's not recognizable to most speakers of the language.
Not a prediction. It was already done. And reverted. Opinions ?
I dislike the flag idea, because it's supposed to be languages, not countries. (Bosian, Croation and Srpski having separate wikis notwithstanding.)
Furthermore, you just *know* some idiot will change the UK flag to a US flag. Then another will revert it. Then someone will put both on. Then someone else will object to a language having *two* flags. Then soeone else will use that horrible split US/UK flag I've seen on some multilingual portals. Then someone will protect the page. I suspect flags will provide too much material for idiocy.
Well, we /could/ use the English flag (Cross of St George)..... the only problem would then be that most English-speakers wouldn't recognise it!
-- Arwel Parry http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/ _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l