[Wikipedia-l] 'Proper' languages and bumper stickers

Tue Nov 8 10:05:05 UTC 2005

[ Mark writes ]
> You think that you can claim that just because I am not
> a Serbian, I know nothing about this issue. Well, I have seen images
> of Zlatibor on television, and I read all about the Serbian
> occupation. I have a bumper sticker that says "Free Zlatibor Now!
> Boycott Serbia!", and I own some books on Zlatiborian language. My
> deepest hope is that after the Serbian tyranny ends, I may travel to
> Zlatibor and witness the beauty firsthand.

Boy, I would give an eyetooth for one of those bumper stickers.  Trade
you for a pair of "Zapatistas of the world, untie!" shoe decals...

As long as rants about language acceptance are benig exchanged, here's
something that has been bothering me lately:

It has been suggested more than once that we should get professional
linguists / a small group of Wiki[m]edians to determine what new
languages are 'proper' or acceptable, before asking the community to
discuss and reach consensus.  But should Wikimedia be making decisions
about the officialness of languages at all?  It seems to me we can
neutrally defer this to a higher authority*.

The ISO handles ISO 639-1 and -2 reasonably well; these are standards
designed to identify written documents, and to include those languages
'most frequently represented in the total body of the world's
literature' -- which seems appropriate.  I put some specific
information on meta:
      http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ISO_criteria_for_defining_new_languages

If you think we can do better than the ISO, please comment on that
talk page**...

SJ

*  "Wikipedia includes 74 major and 7 minor[1] languages with over
1000 articles. ...
   [1]  'Major' languages are defined as those with two-letter ISO
639-1 codes, a set of languages considered to be most frequently
represented in world literature."

**  Perhaps we can have a standard procedure that assumes an ISO-2
code language, and provide for exceptions.  Some current non-ISO
wikipedia languages, illustrating various reasons different users
might have not to stick blindly to such a standard :
 - zh_min_nan (1,200 articles; listed in places as "taiwanese") ,
 - tpi (tok pisin, recent conlang, 160 articles),
 - fiu_vro (Võro, 105 articles & activity),
 - roa_rup (Aromanian; 29 articles & little activity, but just got ISO
639-2 approval for "rup" in September).
 + Current well-received /proposals/ for non-ISO languages include pdc
(Pennsylvania dutch), which already has a 500-article site independent
of Wikimedia).