Language committee/Archives/2009-08
List of approved projects edit
- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
01 August 2009 13:46
Robin, Gerard, may you list here recently approved projects, so I may proceed with sending it to the Board and filling bug report?
- Robin P. (SPQRobin)
01 August 2009 13:04
These are the approved wikis:
- Sorani Wikipedia - Punjabi Wikipedia - Mirandese Wikipedia - Acehnese Wikipedia
Regards, Robin
- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
02 August 2009 09:19
Michael, projects recently approved by Language committee are:
- Sorani Wikipedia
- Punjabi Wikipedia
- Mirandese Wikipedia
- Acehnese Wikipedia
This is a regular request, so, we'll pass a regular procedure.
BCC Western Baloutsh edit
Recently approved projects edit
- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
03 August 2009 05:52
Sorry, I've just copied the list :) It is Western Punjabi Wikipedia, language of Pakistan written in Arabic script (unlike Eastern Punjabi, language of India written in Gurmukhi script). We already have Eastern Punjabi Wikipedia with the generic Punjabi code (cf. [1], [2]), but we don't have a possibility to make efficient conversion engine between those two scripts and those two language varieties.
- Robin P. (SPQRobin)
03 August 2009 18:37
I just saw Turkish Wikinews has also been approved at the beginning of July, so you could add that to the list as well.
- Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
12 August 2009 21:14
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Scanian Scy edit
- Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
04 August 2009 11:18
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- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
04 August 2009 13:42
May we check this claim from the article about Scanian language/dialects [1]:
"Scanian was previously classified as a regional language by SIL International, but before the latest update, the Swedish representative to ISO/TC-37, the technical committee overseeing ISO 639, required that Scanian be removed from the ISO/DIS 639-3, the draft just prior to the final draft FDIS, or a positive vote from Sweden would not be forthcoming. The prior identifier ISO 639-3:scy, as used in the Ethnologue 15th edition, is reserved for Scanian, and may become active again if a request is submitted to have it reinstated during the annual review process. Within the previous SIL International classification of Scanian were the dialects in the province of Scania, some of the southern dialects of Halland (halländska in Swedish), the dialects of Blekinge (blekingska in Swedish) and the dialects of the Danish island of Bornholm (bornholmsk in Danish)."
If so, this is clearly a political motivation and I would use former ISO 639-3 code.
- Jon Harald Søby (Jon Harald Søby)
04 August 2009 19:41
The part about political motivation is true (AFAIK, I don't remember my source for it), however no request for a re-adding has been made after it was removed from the final standard - a process which can not be hindered by Swedish representatives. I can however guarantee that Scanian is 100 % eligible with Swedish, and the code should never have been there in the first place; it is merely a dialect with a somewhat peculiar history (the Danish influence). People who request a Scanian Wikipedia only do so because they want "their own Wikipedia", which does not comply with our mission.
(There is however the case of dlc, which was removed along with scy; if dlc was meant to represent Elfdalian, it was clearly wrong to remove it from the standard, as Eldalian is very different from Swedish and definately qualifies as a separate language. But that is not the issue at hand.)
-- Jon Harald Søby
- Antony D. Green (Antony D. Green)
04 August 2009 22:18
I'd say it's not our position to second-guess the reasons SIL may have for assigning or removing codes. (Assigning seven different codes to Dutch Low Saxon was political too.) Our rules our clear: no ISO 639-3 code = no Wikimedia project. We shouldn't crystal-ball the possibility of Scanian and/or Dalecarlian getting their codes back in the future. If that happens, we'll worry about it then, but until then the answer must be no. (I'm just glad no one thought to request a Yinglish Wikipedia during the few years
- that* had an ISO code!)
Antony Green
- Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
04 August 2009 22:22
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- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
06 August 2009 11:00
The main purpose of Language committee is not to make structured rules for ourselves, but to be sure that a random proposal for a new language edition of some Wikimedia project is a valid one.
The most important role of the Language committee is to reject non-existent languages. We had a case a couple of months ago with Dalmatian as a Slavic language.
At the other hand, we have some set of rules related to ancient, constructed and fictional languages because of their questionable abilities to spread education.
We are able now (thanks to Antony and Michael) to give our own opinion to linguistic issues. And I don't think that we should blindly follow political reasons behind ISO decisions.
So, I think that we should use ISO standards in the next way:
- If the linguistic entity has an ISO 639-3 code, it is eligible to
have Wikimedia projects, except the language is ancient, constructed or fictional one.
- If the language is ancient or constructed, it has to be highly
useful to have a project (Ancient Greek, Classical Chinese and Esperanto are such languages).
- Fictional languages without significant number (which is what?) of
native speakers are not eligible.
- If it doesn't have ISO 639-3 code, the situation is not perfectly
clear, and it has ISO 639-6 code, we may decide to make a language eligible for WM projects.
- If it doesn't have ISO 639-6 code, language is not eligible for
having Wikimedia projects.
I think that those rules are clear enough. The main reason behind such construction is to base our decisions on existing linguistic work, but to have enough of freedom to pass political decisions of ISO 639-3, which defines in our world what is a language and what it is not (which is, BTW, very bizarre).
- Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
06 August 2009 11:26
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- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
06 August 2009 11:41
First of all, I don't give a shit for what one political organization thinks about what language is and what language is not.
Second, language has to have ISO 639-6 code (and, yes, I think that all entities which have ISO 639-6 codes *are* languages; again, I really don't care what one political organization thinks about it). So, it is not ambiguous because some recognition of language system has to exist.
If you think that usefulness, like the fact that the most of Eastern Asia educational systems have incorporated Classical Chinese in their educational system, is ambiguous (oh, sorry, it is "highly ambiguous" for you), then we may open a lot of other "ambiguous" questions, like is it really necessary to block any of those three groups of languages (ancient, constructed and fictional) because those languages *will* spread education, even by using neologisms in the case of ancient languages. And our primary goal is not intellectual masturbation over linguistic issues, but spreading educational materials.
- Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
06 August 2009 12:06
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- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
06 August 2009 12:18
Of course that we won't accept Latvian spoken and Latvian written as two separate projects because we have brains.
However, in the stricter sense of the word meaning, my position is not political. I am not influenced by positions of what do governments think that language is or not. At the other side, ISO is influenced not just by governments, but by corporations, like Microsoft is. And, please, don't try to argue in favor of one organization so deeply involved in daily politics of different interest groups.
Turkish Wikinews edit
- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
04 August 2009 15:20
A regular procedure again. This time for Turkish Wikinews.
- Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
11 August 2009 19:37
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- Milos Rancic (Millosh)
12 August 2009 09:10
Wich problem?
- Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
12 August 2009 09:21
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