[Foundation-l] A proposal for new language creation

Sat Nov 26 02:25:32 UTC 2005

On 11/25/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > This is exactly the policy we adopted several years ago, which has proved
> > insufficient.
> >
> > Relying on existence of ISO codes brings us:
> > * split Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian replacing Serbocroatian [controverial]
> > * Klingon

Another issue is, that we've already created wikipedias in most ISO
639-1 languages.  So those that remain are by definition somewhat
difficult.

> > and denies various languages/dialects/whatever which don't have their own codes
> > but which are oft asked for.

Should it be possible for language enthusiasts to pitch to Wikipedia
directly, rather than to some third-party language-centered org that
WP truts and works with?  If it were not possible to pitch directly to
WM (say, acceptance by such a third-party group is a pre-req to
applying for a lang-project), this would help avoid subsets of the
world's language zealots engaging in subsets of global debates on WM
mailing lists.

> The only problem is that the list of ISO codes is highly politicized and
> broken in many many ways.  It was fine for getting a list of things like
> "English" and "German" and "French" and so on, but it breaks down when

Who are the target audiences for a new and improved list of codes? 
language-enthusiast editors?  readers?  third-party content
developers/aggregators?  linguists?  translators? educators?    If
some of these audiences will have to do more work and others less,
which should get priority?

--
++SJ