[Wikipedia-l] Re: Flags

[James R. Johnson]

I'm aware of the issues regarding the flags, but if you put up a British
flag, or the flag of France, or the flag of Germany, I'm going to understand
you mean English, French, and German.  It's already done on many other
websites to choose languages.  Why not just use the "country of origin" to
determine the flag?  That'll solve the problem of all the French, Spanish,
and English speaking countries.

Just a thought.

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ronald Chmara
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 10:45 AM
To: Mark Williamson; wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Flags


On Jan 10, 2005, at 12:41 AM, Mark Williamson wrote:
> However, I'm not so sure it would be a good idea to have it on an
> international portal to represent the Sicilian language. If flags MUST
> be used, then without a question that is the flag that should be used
> to represent the Sicilian language, but otherwise I think flags should
> be absent altogether.

In regards to flags, might I suggest, in the spirit of "A Modest 
Proposal":
For each language spoken,  rather than use one flag for "color", might 
I suggest that each language have representational flags representing 
all countries where 1% or more of the resident population speaks that 
language. Thus, for the english language, we would have a mere 38 flags 
or so, making sure we had quite a colorful and attractive layout. Same 
with French, Spanish, and possibly a few other languages. At the top 
and bottom of each page, rather than having something dull and legible 
like text, we could have hundreds of bright and colorful flags, 
representing all of the recognized and provisional nationalities, so 
one may switch to flags, rather than languages!

Of course, in order to provide the needed detail on flags, we might 
need to limit flag sizes to a minimum of 128 pixels in order to not 
insult a given nation. Sure, for 6-10,000 flags 
(nations/state-province-region/locale), this may require several 
screens of flags before one can read articles text, but nationalism and 
regionalism is a good thing! In order to access a given language, we 
could break it up into multiple screens, so one could simply click on a 
nationality flag, and then a subset flag representing a state or 
region, and if needed, a locality flag, and thus be presented with a 
small array of word flags to represent the some 6,000+ languages spoken 
in the world today. Thus, by using a complex series of flags to 
determine language, we can avoid the utter simplification of using 
actual languages to select languages, and provoke needed nationalism, 
patriotic sentiment, and jingoism around the world!

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_speakers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries

-Bop

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l