Saturday, May 28, 2005

Chippewa or Ojibwe

Within the Wikimedia projects we have some rules. One of them is "ignore all rules" but that is a different story. The rule about what languages we support is based on a few things. For me the existence of a ISO-639 code is the more important one. I have been "bold" as I use the ISO-639-3 code; this one is not even ratified yet but it does include many more languages ..

Today I was working on some translations from the English Wiktionary and the word "fruit" had two translations in language I had not seen before. One of these was the "Ojibwe" language. There is not mention of this language in the ISO-639-3 so I had a problem. The language codes that indicate that a word is a language are based on this code.

Google as so often turned out to be my friend; the Ojibwe are better known as the Chippewa; the code for the Chippewa language is ciw. So I was pleased to have a code to go with the Ojibwe language.

In the Ultimate Wiktionary there will be no reliance on the existence of an ISO 639 code. We could have more languages and nobody would realise ..

Thanks,
GerardM

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