[Foundation-l] Community draft of language proposal policy

Fri Sep 5 11:02:43 UTC 2008

Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:03 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> Jesse Plamondon-Willard wrote:
>>> The community draft for a language proposal policy stagnates while
>>> some complain fashionably about the lack of community involvement in
>>> the approval process (and the subcommittee unfairness/conspiracy/evil
>>> thereof). If you're interested enough to comment on the policy on
>>> mailing lists, please comment on or edit the community draft.
>>>
>>>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_proposal_policy/Community_draft
>>>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta_talk:Language_proposal_policy/Community_draft
>> Fair comment. I have edited the community draft as per the opinions
>> expressed by several people on this list:
>>
>> Diff:
>> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta%3ALanguage_proposal_policy%2FCommunity_draft&diff=1165824&oldid=1165538>
>>
>> Permalink:
>> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:Language_proposal_policy/Community_draft&oldid=1165824>
> 
> Finally, more reasonable suggestion. Relying strictly on ISO 639 codes
> is not the best idea.
> 
> The only question which I have is: why to move from ISO 639 to RFC
> 4646 codes? Is there any advantage and if so, which?

RFC 4646 is a superset of ISO 639. An RFC 4646 language tag typically
consists of an ISO 639 code, optionally follwed by hyphen-separated
subtags, which identify regional variations (such as en-AU), scripts (such
as sr-Latn) or dialects recognised by IANA but not by the ISO 639
authority (mostly obsolete with ISO 639-3). It also allows the
construction of private-use language subtags, prefixed by "x-".

RFC 4646 is the standard in computing, because it's often useful to be as
precise as possible when identifying language variations. The original
version of this language identification scheme was published in 1995 as
RFC 1766.

-- Tim Starling