"Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)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)
shows how far things can
go. If we really get bored we can always use machine translation into
the "language of electric mice" at