> If we want to avoid this complexity, we could just go by prefix. So if the
> languages is "de", variants like "de-CH" or "de-DE_old" would be
considered ok.
> Ordering these alphabetically would put the "main" code (with no suffix)
first.
> May be ok for a start.
I find this issue potentially controversial, and I think that the community
at large should be involved in this matter to avoid future dissatisfaction
and to promote involvement in the decision-making.
For languages there are regulatory bodies that assign codes, but for
varieties it is not the case, or at least not totally. Even under the en-gb
there are many varieties and dialects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_English_language#United_Kingdom
In my opinion it would be more appropriate to use standardized language
codes, and then specify the dialect with an item, as it provides greater
flexibility. However, as mentioned before I would prefer if this topic in
particular would be discussed with wiktionarians.
Thanks for moving this forward!
David
On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 11:45 AM, Daniel Kinzler <
daniel.kinz...@wikimedia.de> wrote:
> Thank you Denny for having an open mind! And sorry for being a nuisance ;)
>
> I think it's very important to have controversial but constructive
> discussions
> about these things. Data models are very hard to change even slightly once
> people have started to create and use the data. We need to try hard to get
> it as
> right as possible off the bat.
>
> Some remarks inline below.
>
> Am 25.11.2016 um 03:32 schrieb Denny Vrandečić:
> > There is one thing that worries me about the multi-lemma approach, and
> that are
> > mentions of a discussion about ordering. If possible, I would suggest
> not to
> > have ordering in every single Lexeme or even Form, but rather to use the
> > following solution:
> >
> > If I understand it correctly, we won't let every Lexeme have every
> arbitrary
> > language anyway, right? Instead we will, for each language that has
> variants
> > have somewhere in the configurations an explicit list of these variants,
> i.e.
> > say, for English it will be US, British, etc., for Portuguese Brazilian
> and
> > Portuguese, etc.
>
> That approach is similar to what we are now doing for sorting Statement
> groups
> on Items. There is a global ordering of properties defined on a wiki page.
> So
> the community can still fight over it, but only in one place :) We can
> re-order
> based on user preference using a Gadget.
>
> For the multi-variant lemmas, we need to declare the Lexeme's language
> separately, in addition to the language code associated with each lemma
> variant.
> It seems like the language will probably represented as reference to a
> Wikidata
> Item (that is, a Q-Id). That Item can be associated with an (ordered) list
> of
> matching language codes, via Statements on the Item, or via configuration
> (or,
> like we do for unit conversion, configuration generated from Statements on
> Items).
>
> If we want to avoid this complexity, we could just go by prefix. So if the
> languages is "de", variants like "de-CH" or "de-DE_old" would be
> considered ok.
> Ordering these alphabetically would put the "main" code (with no suffix)
> first.
> May be ok for a start.
>
> I'm not sure yet on what level we want to enforce the restriction on
> language
> codes. We can do it just before saving new data (the "validation" step),
> or we
> could treat it as a community enforced soft constraint. I'm tending
> towards the
> former, though.
>
> > Given that, we can in that very same place also define their ordering
> and their
> > fallbacks.
>
> Well, all lemmas would fall back on each other, the question is just which
> ones
> should be preferred. Simple heuristic: prefer the shortest language code.
> Or go
> by what MediaWiki does fro the UI (which is what we do for Item labels).
>
> > The upside is that it seems that this very same solution could also be
> used for
> > languages with different scripts, like Serbian, Kazakh, and Uzbek
> (although it
> > would not cover the problems with Chinese, but that wasn't solved
> previously
> > either - so the situation is strictly better). (It doesn't really solve
> all
> > problems - there is a reason why ISO treats language variants and scripts
> > independently - but it improves on the vast majority of the problematic
> cases).
>
> Yes, it's not the only decision we have to make in this regard, but the
> most
> fundamental one, I think.
>
> One consequence of this is that Forms should probably also allow multiple
> representations/spellings. This is for consistency with the lemma, for code
> re-use, and for compatibility with Lemon.
>
> > So, given that we drop any local ordering in the UI and API, I think that
> > staying close to Lemon and choosing a TermList seems currently like the
> most
> > promising approach to me, and I changed my mind.
>
> Knowing that you won't do that without a good reason, I thank you for the
>
