Minh Nguyen wrote:
Gerard, please note that Wikipedia hasn't standardized on ISO 639-2 like Wiktionary has. Otherwise, you'd be using "eng.wikipedia.org" instead of "en.wikipedia.org".
With rare exceptions, we follow RFC 3066 for language codes; this is the standard used on the web for the Content-Language HTTP header, HTML 'lang' attribute, etc.
This uses, roughly, in priority order: * 2-letter ISO 639-1 code * 3-letter ISO 639-2 code * One of the specially registered 'i-*' codes * Non-standard 'x-*' codes
ISO 639-3 codes will most likely end up in there sooner or later.
Where no standard codes are available, we've sometimes ended up using something else; in this case we *should* be using the ISO 639-3 3-letter code. If there are exceptions that are definitely wrong, we probably want to fix that.
Maybe someday; I still remember going to "en2.wikipedia.org" way back when, so the URLs certainly aren't permanent.
That was crude load-balancing before we had something better set up. :) It's redirected if you've got really old URLs from that period.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)