[Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

[Tim Starling]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 1.  The rule should not tell us to have separate wikipedias for
> British English and Australian English and American English.  (Nor for
> "African-American Vernacular English", popularly called "ebonics", nor
> for "Southern American English", my own native dialect.)
> 
> 2.  The rule should provide some means of exclusion for vanity
> projects and extremely small (and thus unlikely to be successful)
> groups.
> 
> 3.  The rule should be external to Wikipedia, based on some other
> official standards.  The reason for this is that this is only our
> default, and the whole purpose of the rule is to give us one less
> thing to argue about.  Let some international body make the decision,
> and then we follow it unless we do something unusual.

The Ethnologue, a language catalogue published by SIL International, 
does all of these things. SIL is a non-profit organisation dedicated to 
linguistics, language documentation and literacy. Their catalogue makes 
a division between languages and dialects based on linguistic rather 
than national concerns. They list 6,800 "main languages", plus dialects 
and alternate names. This is as opposed to ISO's approximately 490 
"languages", many of which even they admit are actually groups of 
languages.

SIL seems to have little time for constructed languages, listing only 
three. ISO 639-2, on the other hand, has a policy allowing any language 
with more than 50 documents to obtain a code. Hence, Klingon is included 
in ISO's short list, but not in SIL's much longer one.

My proposal is to automatically allow any language considered one of 
SIL's main languages, and to only seek community approval when it is not 
listed. I think we should largely ignore the ISO list.

-- Tim Starling