Subject: [Ltru] "IETF language code" in Wikipedia

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 01:03:17 -0800

I've just found the article "IETF language code" in Wikipedia, which 
purports to describe RFC 4646 language tagging but contains some rather 
serious factual errors and misleading statements.

A few examples:

    "It is written that subtags are separated from each other by a 
hyphen. This is not true for the given examples in cases where the 
subtags are empty. The example is en not en-----."

This statement presupposes that tags can contain "empty subtags," which 
do not in fact exist.  There is only one subtag in the tag "en".

    "The IETF only derives their subtags from ISO standards, they are 
therefore not ISO conform."

The RFC 4646 system does not claim to be "ISO-conformant," and 
explicitly seeks to mitigate some of the instability of the ISO 
standards, so this statement is a red herring.  Country-code TLDs are 
also not ISO-conformant since they use ".uk" instead of ".gb", and use 
other extensions to ISO 3166 such as ".ac".

    "It also reserves some tag parts that currently do not exist. 
Section 2.2.1, point 4 reads:
        "4. All four-character language subtags are reserved for 
possible future standardization.
    "At the same time ISO 15924 is a four-character subtag, all ready."

This is a non sequitur.  There is no syntactical or namespace collision 
between language subtags and script subtags, just as there is none 
between 2-letter language subtags and region subtags.

    "Since the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 can change from time to time there is 
ambiguity in the use. E.g. CS could refer to Serbia and Montenegro or to 
Czechoslovakia.  Section 2.2.4. point 3 C&D solve this. For ambiguous 
ISO 3166-1 codes the UN M.49 code shall be used."

This is oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy.  While ISO code 
elements may be ambiguous for the reason given, RFC 4646 does not assign 
a UN M.49-based subtag in place of *each* of the "ambiguous codes," only 
the more recently assigned.  Going forward, if ISO 3166/MA reassigned 
"CS" to yet another country, that country would get a UN-based subtag 
but the existing "CS" subtag would not be changed.

I'll be making the necessary factual corrections to the article, but 
others are of course free to jump in and do it first.  I thought it 
would be good to let the list know that these misconceptions exist and 
may be widespread, because of the wide use of Wikipedia,

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages 

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---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 13:29:06 +0100

Doug Ewell wrote:

> I'll be making the necessary factual corrections to the article

The title is already dubious, "Internet language tags" or similar 
would be clearer.  But better start with small corrections before.

> let the list know that these misconceptions exist and may be 
> widespread

It has only three links ("what links here", not counting the "IANA
language code" redirect), and in essence one author ("history") =>
likely a genuine error and no intentional disinformation, unless
it's about the "IETF" bit on the same level as "linguasphere".

Get some good asbestos for this endeavour, Wikipedia is worse than
the IETF in all respects.

Frank