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)