Kaihsu Tai wrote:
We requested the hostname 'zh-min-nan', per
RFC 3066
"http://www.iana.org/assignments/lang-tags/zh-min-nan". I
registered the tag, so I should know. Some silly person did
not honour our request, but created a syncretic monster
'zh-cfr' without consulting the community (to prevent
forking (and to prevent giving it any authority), I will not
let you know where the letters CFR came from). Then, some
(other) silly person dictated 'minnan'.
Actually that was me both times.
Then, yet some
other person suggested the meaningless 'poj'.
We don't pick language codes on the basis of what the community in
question requests. Instead we are attempting to create some kind of
site-wide standard. Wikimedia is not a webhosting company, it does not
assign subdomains to whoever requests them on a first-come first-served
basis.
The reason for choosing zh-cfr can be summarised in one word: Aromanian.
A wiki in the Aromanian dialect was requested, and it was agreed that we
should have one, but there was a problem with choosing the subdomain.
Aromanian does not have a distinct ISO 639 code, however it is listed in
the Ethlnologue under the code RUP. We had used only ISO 639 codes up to
that time.
The solution we came up with was to use the group ISO 639 code followed
by the SIL code. This allows us to specify most languages in the
Ethnologue without conflicting with the ISO standard, since ISO 639
codes do not contain hyphens.
Using the hyphenated language tags assigned by IANA, such as zh-min-nan,
would conflict with this scheme. For example if we used zh-yue, it would
be difficult to know what "yue" refers to. Is it an SIL code or an
assigned code?
We could use the RFC 3066 codes instead. This is still an option.
However it wouldn't give us access to a large number of languages
without resorting to awkward constructions such as x-sil-RUP.
Later I came to doubt the usefulness of language codes which are longer
than the names of the languages themselves. Maybe
en.wikipedia.org is a
useful shortcut for
english.wikipedia.org, but surely
aromanian.wikipedia.org would be easier to remember than
roa-rup.wikipedia.org.
If I'm wrong about that, feel free to explain it to me.
If I understand correctly, Shizhao's problem is that
holopedia.net, and
by extension
minnan.wikipedia.org, is written in a script peculiar to
Taiwan. The writing there is thus not representative of min-nan
generally. So wouldn't it be better to use the RFC 3066 code specific to
Taiwanese, namely zh-min-nan-TW? Or indeed, in keeping with my earlier
point about such language codes being cryptic and unnecessarily lengthy,
why not use ho-lo-oe.wikipedia.org?
-- Tim Starling