Mailing List Archive

On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 20:41, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Do meta and sep11 belong in the list of languages, or in the list
> of namespaces?

They're non-language-specific sections, while en, fr, zh etc are
language-specific sections.

Theoretically, one might keep them as physically separate
wikis/databases while _encyclopedia_ sections in all languages are
consolidated into a single database that is aware of the connections
between languages.

Or, all sections (the encyclopedia in each language, the multilingual
meta-discussion, and the any-language memorial wiki) could go into a
single glob, and we make a distinction between types of sections only
for purposes of linking encyclopedia articles on the same topic
together.

On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 20:45, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Are the language codes always going to be two characters, or might there
> be longer ones?

Not all languages have two-letter codes; eventually we might move into
three-letter codes, and conceivably also languages which have neither a
2 nor a 3 letter code and have to make do with something like
'art-lojban'.

> Might we want to support distinctions like en_US and
> en_UK one day?

I'd be reluctant to do that, since there'd be 99% overlap in material,
even worse than the ex-Yugoslav business.

On the other hand, a cleaner way to handle Chinese would be nice;
currently pages in simplified and traditional characters are kind of
mixed together, with disambiguation where necessary... I'm not really
satisfied with it, but then I'm not the target audience either.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)