[Foundation-l] Translation of the language names

[Milos Rancic]

2008/5/14 Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is hard to believe that we don't have translations of the
>> Wikimedian language names in the Wikimedian languages. So, please, do
>> that starting from the page:
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_names
>>
>
> Sorry, but what exactly is the point of this?  Isn't it best to use
> the language in its proper name (or language code) whenever possible?
>
> i.e. instead of us using "Japanese", shouldn't we refer to it by "ja"
> and/or "日本語"?

All statistics in English are naming languages because the name in
English is a default. So, why other languages shouldn't have that
privilege to have statistics in their own language, instead of having
code names (which already exists).

BTW, except for well known languages (~30), all other codes are not so
useful, even the language name may be known. While adding Crimean
Tatar, I realized that I added it with "chr" code, instead of "crh".
Ask a random Wikipedian which languages have codes "eu", "fa"  and
even "zh"...

I think that your approach has a lot of common with the fact that you
are a native English speaker and that you have everything in defaults.