[Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

[Roozbeh Pournader]

My personal experience in dealing with software internationalization
and computing in minority languages, is that SIL can't be trusted,
specially where it draws a line. ISO 639 started with a background in
what US Library of Congress was doing in categorizing books (written
form of languages). On the other hand, SIL started to find about very
local languages (many of which are not written, or share a written
form with a more common language), to help religious evangelists to
find about minor communities and translate the bible to the language.
I believe the written vs spoken distinction is very important here.

As an example, in the case of the Persian language, which I helped
start its wikipedia, we clearly could easily unify the encyclopedias
for what ISO 639 calls "Persian", and what SIL is calling Eastern
Farsi, Western Farsi, and Hazaragi. These three are sometimes
pronounced so differently which makes it impossible for a Tehrani
speaker to understand a native Kabuli, but are so similiar when
written, that we can write a single encyclopedic article that is
grammatically correct. SIL's Persian group, which can be found at   
<http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1000> contains some
vague cases, but also the clear case of Tajiki which can't be unified
with the Persian wikipedia, since it's written in Cyrillic, not
Arabic. And guess what? ISO 639 already separates Tajiki and gives it
a separate entry and code.

On Mon, 31 May 2004 21:22:34 +1000, Tim Starling
<ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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