[Foundation-l] Allemanic and Albanian - conditional approval for Gheg

Fri Jan 4 13:36:37 UTC 2008

2008/1/4, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com>:
> On 04/01/2008, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I want to propose that the Allemanic Wikipedia is renamed to
> > gsw.wikipedia.org and thereby associate the language with the correct
> > ISO-639 code.
>
> (I am not making any comment on whether or not to rename)
>
> Regarding duplicate-assigned language codes - how did we get to this?
> I was under the impression that all our currently-existing language
> codes were either the correct ISO-639, or given deliberately "invalid"
> codes so as not to conflict with the standard ones.

Allemanic 'took over' from a more narrowly-defined 'Alsacian'
Wikipedia, which got its language code before the language code policy
that you refer to came into being.

> Given that that is apparently not the case :-) - do we know how many
> other "duplicate" codes are kicking around in our projects, and would
> it be worth looking into renaming these sooner rather later? Any
> rename is tough, but the earlier it's done the less upheaval there is
> for everyone.

There are no other cases like als. The only other languages that got
names that are neither valid ISO-639 codes nor a code of the type we
now use (being the ISO-639 code of either  the language group it
belongs to or the 'mother language' if it is more of a dialect, then
-, then something additional to be decided on a case-by-case base, as
far as I know) were tokipona and min-nan, but:
1. Those codes were longer than 3 letters and thus not conflicting
with anything in ISO-639, and
2. tokipona wikipedia has been discontinued and min-nan wikipedia has
already been moved.

> On a more practical note - if this rename is done, I note there are
> the best part of 3,500 articles on als.wp, and presumably they have a
> proportionate audience. How are we planning to handle the changeover?
> Making 3,500 valid URLs dead links doesn't seem productive; is there
> any way we can put soft redirects into the new als.wp so as to point
> to articles in gsw.wp? There probably won't be *too* much conflict for
> article names, at least not for the forseeable future.

I have no real knowledge in the area, but I think it's not too hard to
have _any_ call to http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someweirdtitle come
out at http://gsw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someweirdtitle. Given that there
is no request yet for Tosk (and there might well not be one in the
near future because of its similarity to standard Albanian), things
could be done that way for the time being.

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels