[Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia

[Berto 'd Sera]

Whether what I say is nonsense or not is none of my worries, I judge by the
practical results an approach gives me, not based on any ideological theory.
To a certain extent all subjective decisions ARE pure nonsense anyway, and I
can't think of anything more POV than stating what is a language and what is
not. 

Seriously, how would you manage? Do we call up the mobs to scream and swear
as we did before, or do we nominate 7 Valencian and 7 Catalan Knights and
make it a Royal Tournament? That's all the choice you're given, you know?

You EITHER 
   choose an external reference 
OR 
   choose yourself. 

If you choose yourself (as WMF) you either 
  have a limited number of people playing God 
or 
  make it the result of a wider battle. 

Make your choice. It's but three checkboxes in all. 

I made mine. The WMF has a voting rate of about 5% at elections, only a VERY
limited number of people read lists and come to META, so no vote can
represent the majority in principle. 

No matter how you restrict the number of people having the right to decide
(to avoid socket-puppets) you pretty often end up with votes that are 100%
emotional, and pretty often have nothing to do with languages (they are
actually internal splits based on personal conflicts).

Will you enter this mud and start to play God? I'd rather have an external
decision made. Even if sometimes my own opinion and ISO codes DO diverge. So
what? Most of the stuff on this planet is not as I would want to be...

Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
 

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tim Starling
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2007 5:34 PM
To: wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia

Berto 'd Sera wrote:
> Hoi,
> 
> No project is being accepted unless it has a valid ISO 639 code, such are
> our current policies. We chose to do this to avoid being "those who decide
> what is a language and what is not". We don't make the standards, we just
> use them "as they are". :) Any alternative would fall in the boundaries of
> "Original Research", which is not what wikipedias are about.

What nonsense. Wikimedia can and should do original research. It's only in
the main namespace of Wikipedia that we have that restriction, and that's
because we see an encyclopedia as a secondary source.

It's only since the addition of ISO 639-3 that it's even feasible to use
ISO 639 as a canonical list of languages, and that's only because SIL was
recognised as the most competent body to do such a thing. The Library of
Congress was doing a poor job of it, and I would absolutely stand by our
decision to add language editions to Wikipedia that they didn't recognise.

-- Tim Starling


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