On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 20:41, Jonathan Walther wrote:
Do meta and sep11 belong in the list of languages, or in the list of namespaces?
They're non-language-specific sections, while en, fr, zh etc are language-specific sections.
Theoretically, one might keep them as physically separate wikis/databases while _encyclopedia_ sections in all languages are consolidated into a single database that is aware of the connections between languages.
Or, all sections (the encyclopedia in each language, the multilingual meta-discussion, and the any-language memorial wiki) could go into a single glob, and we make a distinction between types of sections only for purposes of linking encyclopedia articles on the same topic together.
On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 20:45, Jonathan Walther wrote:
Are the language codes always going to be two characters, or might there be longer ones?
Not all languages have two-letter codes; eventually we might move into three-letter codes, and conceivably also languages which have neither a 2 nor a 3 letter code and have to make do with something like 'art-lojban'.
Might we want to support distinctions like en_US and en_UK one day?
I'd be reluctant to do that, since there'd be 99% overlap in material, even worse than the ex-Yugoslav business.
On the other hand, a cleaner way to handle Chinese would be nice; currently pages in simplified and traditional characters are kind of mixed together, with disambiguation where necessary... I'm not really satisfied with it, but then I'm not the target audience either.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)