[Wikipedia-l] Re: I want to start a new language... with the code"eg" please.

Mon May 17 23:22:45 UTC 2004

Andre Engels wrote:

>"Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> schrieb:
>  
>
>>My general feeling is that unless there's some very good reason not to
>>have a particular language, we should have it.  Some good reasons that
>>I can think of: (1) the language is a joke or vanity project (2) the
>>language is just a slight change of dialect from some other language.
>>
>>For example, it would be bad to have a Klingon Wikipedia, I think.  It
>>would be bad to have separate sites for British and American English.
>>
>>And finally, I think that it's very very convenient for us to avoid
>>arguments about this by reference to ISO standards.  We could, in some
>>cases, make exceptions, but we should be cautious about doing so.
>>    
>>
>I have before proposed to go with ISO 639-2. Main rule for ISO 639-2 is
>that there should be 50 different documents divided over at most 50
>places. I would not put it as a hard rule, but I'd say that for languages
>outside ISO 639-2, the onus is with the person wanting to add it to give
>reasons, while for languages within, the onus is with those who want to
>refrain from adding it.
>  
>
The only problem with such a rule is that it's so sensible.  That makes 
convincing people more difficult. :-)

I would even recognize SIL codes as a basis for accepting a language.  
On the other hand there are some languages that are officially 
recognized despite some very week credentials (eg. Bosnian or Moldovan)

http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html shows how far things can 
go.  If we really get bored we can always use machine translation into 
the "language of electric mice" at http://pikachize.eye-of-newt.com/

Ec