Kaihsu Tai wrote:
We requested the hostname 'zh-min-nan', per RFC 3066 "http://www.iana.org/assignments/lang-tags/zh-min-nan". I registered the tag, so I should know. Some silly person did not honour our request, but created a syncretic monster 'zh-cfr' without consulting the community (to prevent forking (and to prevent giving it any authority), I will not let you know where the letters CFR came from). Then, some (other) silly person dictated 'minnan'.
Actually that was me both times.
Then, yet some other person suggested the meaningless 'poj'.
We don't pick language codes on the basis of what the community in question requests. Instead we are attempting to create some kind of site-wide standard. Wikimedia is not a webhosting company, it does not assign subdomains to whoever requests them on a first-come first-served basis.
The reason for choosing zh-cfr can be summarised in one word: Aromanian. A wiki in the Aromanian dialect was requested, and it was agreed that we should have one, but there was a problem with choosing the subdomain. Aromanian does not have a distinct ISO 639 code, however it is listed in the Ethlnologue under the code RUP. We had used only ISO 639 codes up to that time.
The solution we came up with was to use the group ISO 639 code followed by the SIL code. This allows us to specify most languages in the Ethnologue without conflicting with the ISO standard, since ISO 639 codes do not contain hyphens.
Using the hyphenated language tags assigned by IANA, such as zh-min-nan, would conflict with this scheme. For example if we used zh-yue, it would be difficult to know what "yue" refers to. Is it an SIL code or an assigned code?
We could use the RFC 3066 codes instead. This is still an option. However it wouldn't give us access to a large number of languages without resorting to awkward constructions such as x-sil-RUP.
Later I came to doubt the usefulness of language codes which are longer than the names of the languages themselves. Maybe en.wikipedia.org is a useful shortcut for english.wikipedia.org, but surely aromanian.wikipedia.org would be easier to remember than roa-rup.wikipedia.org.
If I'm wrong about that, feel free to explain it to me.
If I understand correctly, Shizhao's problem is that holopedia.net, and by extension minnan.wikipedia.org, is written in a script peculiar to Taiwan. The writing there is thus not representative of min-nan generally. So wouldn't it be better to use the RFC 3066 code specific to Taiwanese, namely zh-min-nan-TW? Or indeed, in keeping with my earlier point about such language codes being cryptic and unnecessarily lengthy, why not use ho-lo-oe.wikipedia.org?
-- Tim Starling