[Foundation-l] three-letter language codes

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> Did anyone ever consider completely migrating WMF projects to
> three-letter language codes? Currently two-letter ISO 639-1 code are
> used whenever possible and three-letter ISO 639-2 or ISO 639-3 codes
> are used when a two-letter code is not available.
>
> Among the three-letter codes currently having Wikipedias are Sicilian
> (scn), Kashubian (csb), Nahuatl (nah), Udmurt (udm) and Mari (mhr).
>
> Using three-letter codes for all languages seems to me like a more
> egalitarian approach.
>
> Two-letter URL's must, of course, be kept as redirects.
>
> Can anyone think about any problems with this?

I agree with you and I was thinking about this issue a lot. Without
exceptional cases which should be solved by BCP47 and ISO 639-5 codes,
ISO 639-3 codes should be enough for everything which Wikimedia
projects need. If we are starting now with standardizing Wikimedia
language codes, it would be so.

However, after 10 years we already have tradition. It is not
reasonable to break links which exist for 2/3 of the time of Internet
existence. The most "egalitarian approach" would be redirecting "en"
to "eng" and similar. But then it would look like imposing the rule
for the sake of imposing the rule.

It doesn't mean that we shouldn't do that, but it also means that we
should leave that for the future. Wikimedia should work on cultural
equality, but it has to do that in cooperation with other
organizations.