Re: [Bug-gnupedia]Changes to articles

[Jon Babcock]

Regarding available language identification tags ...

In addition to the standard references (ISO 639-2 and the IANA
registry), the huge list provided by the Ethnologue would be a
extremely useful resource.  Those involved in providing a standard
list of language identification tags for translators/translations will
probably want to read the article, _Language identification and IT:
Addressing problems of linguistic diversity on a global scale_ by
Peter Constable and Gary Simons.

http://www.sil.org/silewp/2000/001/SILEWP2000-001.html#9_proposal

Along with several other issues, Constable and Simons address the
concern that "There are on the order of 6,800 languages known to exist
in the world today, which is an order of magnitude greater than what
existing systems of language identifiers currently cover, and existing
systems do not scale well."

Using ISO 639-2 first, then the IANA registry, and then the Ethnologue
list might be a good policy gnupedia/gne/?

  Soam Vasani wrote:

<snip>

  Each article has an identifier, say "foobar"
  Each version and each translation of the article has a unique
  identifier: "foobar-en-1.0".
  When an article is updated, the version number is incremented
  but the old article is still accessible.  A headnote is added to
  the old article saying that there is a newer version available.

  There are 2 ways of referring to an article:

  writing the full identifier "foobar-en-1.0",
  or saying something like "foobar-autolang-latest",
  where "latest" requests the latest version,
  and "autolang" requests a translation of foobar to the language
  of the referencer if available; if that translation is not
  available it will fall back on a default.

  At the time of writing an article, the translation to that
  language may not be available, so you can't refer to it
  literally.
  But the translation may be added later and changing all
  references to it will be too tedious.  So "autolang" is a useful
  feature.

--
Jon Babcock <address@hidden>