As I see you have already decided to set up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia, since you are looking for a language code. Didn't you wonder why there isn't a language code?
I want to make you aware of the consequences of setting up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia:
*Every single dialect group in Switzerland will have an own WP. There are around 100 local dialects (Baseldytsch is one of the bigger ones). *There are also regional and local dialects in Germany and Austria who might want to have their own WP
Am 18.11.2004 um 12:55 schrieb David Rossel:
Please, don't think about one wikipedia for all swiss-german dialects. That would be the same thing like the Alemannic wikipedia: An uncommon mixture of native dialects.
In this point I agree with you.
But basically you want to set up a Wikipedia for one city with some 160'000 inhabitants and 600'000 inhabitants in the surroundings (where they already speak a slightly different dialect). That is comparable with an American suburb; let's call it Springfield. Imagine they want to have an own Wikipedia, because they're feeling so different, although they're all reading and writing in english.
A Baseldytsch Wikipedia would have much sense as a repository for words that only exist in Baseldytsch and not in German. But for that purpose it might be better to find a way to implement dialect and regional language culture into to the big German one.
German is a standardized language that everyone between the Matterhorn (southern part of Switzerland) and Hamburg (northern Germany) understands, reads and writes. In fact Swiss (also the people in Basel) read better German than their local dialect, because they're not used to the written form of the dialect. That makes German the best language for sharing knowledge within this geographic area. And sharing knowledge is actually the purpose of Wikipedia.
I am not against wiki-encyclopedias in Swiss German dialects. I am very proud of my native dialect and I wanna preserve it as well. But in my opinion this doesn't support the much more important purpose of Wikikpedia to make free knowledge accessible to everyone. If everyone sets up its own wiki, wiki-culture doesn't work anymore.
Cheers Andreas