Brion Vibber wrote:
== Belorusian "old orthography" ==
be-x-old.wikipedia.org -> be-tarask.wikipedia.org
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9823
Some time ago we swapped around the Belorusian Wikipedia, moving the previous version which was primarily using a non-official orthography, from 'be' to 'be-x-old', and re-establishing be.wikipedia.org using the official state orthography.
There was later a request to rename 'be-x-old' (using a non-standard code) to 'be-tarask', a IANA-registered subtag which is rather more descriptive. IMHO this change should not be terribly controversial -- if we're not closing it, we may as well give it its official RFC 4646-registered code.
Old domain and interwikis would be redirected.
I don't know _anything_ about Belarusian orthography, and from reading the bug it seems I may be poking a political hornet's nest here, but I'm going to ask this anyway: are the differences between the two variants straightforward enough in practice that we could use MediaWiki's language variant conversion here? If we can do it for Chinese, it seems at least plausible that it could work here too. Of course, compiling the conversion rules would take some nontrivial effort, but the payoff (not having two redundant projects using different spellings of the same language) seems like it might be worth it.