[Wikipedia-l] Policy draft: Wikimedia projects are not the place for national constitution

Tue Nov 14 04:38:42 UTC 2006

On 13/11/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> For your information.
> http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=mol shows quite clearly
> that under both ISO-639-1/2/3 there is a code for Moldavian. To
> complicate this http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=mol
> does nor agree with this sentiment. So nobody gets it right, not even
> the organisation that maintains ISO-639-3.

It's difficult. Due to Western media hype about Transnistria "forcing
Romanians to use Cyrillic", the recognition of Cyrillic as a
legitimate script used for Moldovan is low internationally. When it is
mentioned that Cyrillic is used in Transnistria, the counter is always
that "they are forced to". There is no proof of this, and to the
contrary, many ethnic Moldavians in countries like Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus, and Kazakhstan continue to use the Cyrillic script, and
certainly nobody is "forcing" them.

Ethnologue fails to even mention that Cyrillic script is still used in
some regions.

But as you know, Ethnologue is not always accurate. They have a
separate entry for "Yinglish", which isn't even a dialect (more of a
sociolect continuum) and none for AAVE (arguably much more different
from Standard English than is Yinglish); an entry for Norn but none
for Singlish.

They do not apply a consistent standard to separate languages from
dialects. If I were editor, that would be one of my top priorities --
establish objective criteria, something along the lines of:

1) Does the community require a separate literature?
2) Is there a separate literary tradition?
3) Do the people consider themselves to use a different language?
4) Is mutual intelligibility under 80% (spoken/signed)?

But there are thousands of languages in Ethnologue, for many of which
very little information is available.

> We have had our fill with this nonsense too often. Mark is correct where
> he says that the language is not the country. The Dutch language is just
> one example where the name does not imply that everyone who speaks Dutch
> as his or her mother tongue is Dutch. Bogdan your argument does not
> wash. When you mention trolling, I wonder when you looked last in a
> mirror. Anyway the best you can do is ignore. That may be kinda hard but
> consider, if this project stinks, anyone knowledgeable will be able to
> sniff it out personally. Then again, roses grow best on dung.

I've pointed this out before (the "if you don't like it, don't look at
it" idea). The response is usually that "it gives a bad name to
Wikimedia", or "others find it offensive".

Mark

-- 
Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.