Andre Engels wrote:
"Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com schrieb:
My general feeling is that unless there's some very good reason not to have a particular language, we should have it. Some good reasons that I can think of: (1) the language is a joke or vanity project (2) the language is just a slight change of dialect from some other language.
For example, it would be bad to have a Klingon Wikipedia, I think. It would be bad to have separate sites for British and American English.
And finally, I think that it's very very convenient for us to avoid arguments about this by reference to ISO standards. We could, in some cases, make exceptions, but we should be cautious about doing so.
I have before proposed to go with ISO 639-2. Main rule for ISO 639-2 is that there should be 50 different documents divided over at most 50 places. I would not put it as a hard rule, but I'd say that for languages outside ISO 639-2, the onus is with the person wanting to add it to give reasons, while for languages within, the onus is with those who want to refrain from adding it.
The only problem with such a rule is that it's so sensible. That makes convincing people more difficult. :-)
I would even recognize SIL codes as a basis for accepting a language. On the other hand there are some languages that are officially recognized despite some very week credentials (eg. Bosnian or Moldovan)
http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html shows how far things can go. If we really get bored we can always use machine translation into the "language of electric mice" at http://pikachize.eye-of-newt.com/
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