gc-ao1990 request - Galician Wikipedia

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Thu May 28 14:56:29 CEST 2015


On 23 May 2015, at 16:37, Luc Pardon <lucp at skopos.be> wrote:

>> Please feel free to write to the editors of the Novas de Galicia, explain your request, and see what they have to say.

I did say please.

>  One: I don't mind having a debate, but I _do_ mind talking to a brick wall.

The hell.

ao1990 was approved after long discussion attending to misgivings I had. Brick wall?

I just love being insulted on this forum. I get it a lot, too. And then people beat me up for not thinking as they do, or for using my own judgement. Which is what I’m supposed to do. Such a pleasure.

> So if you are determined to block this request no matter what, please say so, and then we can all stop wasting our time.

I am not approving the request for gl- at this time because I do not believe that sufficient evidence has been given to show that the publication in question has a significant enough readership to make it matter. The Galician Wikipedia doesn’t have articles about either the newspaper or about the reform. Evidently there are views

I invited you, with the word please, to endeavour 

>  Two: if you are honestly willing to consider approving it, please tell
> me exactly what the editors of the NdG would have to say in order to
> overcome your current reluctance.

I can’t do any such thing. I do not use crystal balls to divine the future. But I think it is prudent to find out SOMETHING real abut this, rather than you just finding stuff on the internet and saying “oh, hey, it must get a prefix”. You haven’t even said that YOU need to tag Galician data. Does anybody? Talk to them and find out what they have to say. I’m not interested in opening up the floodgates to registering things just because they exist. Make some sort of case for it. 

>  You know that they are publishing Galician in AO1990 since 2011, you
> know that the proper tag for that is "gl-ao1990", what else do you want
> to know?

Does anybody care that they do? Do they have any kind of significant readership? There are dozens of English spelling reforms proposed. Does anyone really need to tag this? Again, you haven’t shown that even YOU need to. 

>> Otherwise it seems to me that you are arguing in the abstract (not about your actual need to tag data), and crystal-ball gazing. 
> 
>  When did you ask the requester of "oxendict" to prove that he had an
> "actual need to tag data”?

“oxendict” replaced a subtag replaced long ago. And it wasn’t my idea to replace it either. That was cleanup for the grandfathered stuff. What are you on about?

> When did you ask for proof that the old "en-GB-oed" tag (the one that
> "oxendict" was to replace, remember) was in actual use somewhere, anywhere?

I don’t follow you. This is not analogous to your request for a prefix. 

>  Can you remind me what "actual need to tag data" was relieved by
> replacing the old tag? From what I recall [1], it was more like "arguing
> in the abstract" that grandfathers really should retire.

I didn’t raise the issue. People who handle the subtags did. This is not at all similar to your request. Red herring. 

>  Can you remind us how and when you showed us an "actual need to tag
> data" with "en-IE-oxendict"? I seem to remember that we first wanted
> "Prefix: en-GB", but you said "hey, I'm in Ireland and I use it too".
> Did you ever supply evidence for such use?

What? Doug used this term. Again this wasn’t my idea, and whatever the heck you are trying to do “entrapping me” with this kind of questioning, it isn’t going to work. 

I asked you to please contact the user community for the prefix you think should be registered. Either you show that YOU need to use such a prefix, or that THEY need to, or that SOMEBODY does, or I just assume that you are doing this on theoretical grounds. 

>   The application for the old "en-GB-oed" [2] was justified as follows
> (my emphasis): "The tag en-GB-oed _can_ be used to mark text which, for
> instance, should be spell-checked against an Oxford-specific spelling
> dictionary, rather than a generic "British" one". Now that looks every
> inch like "arguing in the abstract" and "crystal-ball gazing" to me. Can
> you help me understand why it is not?

I don’t have any idea why you are stressing the word “can” there. It is text I erote in the proposal. Twelve years ago. 

In point of fact, I use Oxford spelling, and found (years ago) that there were few resources available to support that. For instance, spell-checkers. LOTS of folks use Oxford spelling. There’s even a user category for it on the Wikipedia. :-) In much commercial software Oxford spelling still isn’t supported well, though one is lucky when a Canadian option is offered, as Canadian spelling is closer to Oxford spelling than either en_GB and en_US. 

The practice of one periodical of unknown distribution or importance using 

It’s my job to raise questions, and suggest means for finding out more where I think it would be helpful. I suggested them to you. If you don’t want to do it, fine. I reject the proposal. 

>   To summarize: please explain why I'm mistaken in concluding that you
> are applying different standards to similar things. Failing that, please
> explain why tags for Portuguese orthographies should meet much higher
> criteria than tags for English ones - and tell me where in BCP47 it is
> written that it must be so.

Your arguments about something proposed 12 years ago that has nothing to do with what you’re proposing now don’t make any sense. No one doubted that Oxford spelling was in widespread use. 

>  And by the way, it would help if you could tell me where in BCP47 it
> says that a request MUST be rejected unless the applicant can show "an
> actual need to tag data", i.e. where it says that "crystal-ball gazing"
> (as you call it) is forbidden.

I’m empowered to use my judgement and to make decisions accordingly. The assignment of elements is not done according to a flat application algorithm. It’s done via the judgement of the reviewer in discussion with others. I’m trying to help you to make a good case. So far I think it’s weak enough to reject. 

>> Aside: Shall we encode subtags for EVERY proposal for English spelling reform? 
> 
>   For proposals: probably not. For accepted proposals: yes, of course.
> 
>   How do you expect a spell checker to know which rule set to enforce
> if there is no proper subtag? That was precisely why you wanted
> "en-GB-oed", remember?

I invite you again to involve the alleged user community. 

>> Why not go off and implement ao1990 and come back when actual problems are found?
>> 
> 
>  This sentence is utterly incomprehensible to me. What do you mean by
> "implementing an orthography"? What kind of "actual problems" can one
> find when "implementing" an orthography? And how can this list help
> fixing them?

Implement the subtag and find out if its current definition is problematic. 

>  Unless you help me understanding what you mean, you cannot expect me
> to understand why I should "go off”.

Do what you want. If you don’t try to get further information from the user community in this case (and we did have discussions with users (and opponents) of ao1990 for Portuguese) then I don’t think there’s enough merit to your request.

I believe I’m treating this stuff with due diligence. Maybe you think I should just rubber-stamp anything that comes in, but that hasn’t been my role in the past and I don’t think it’s the intention of the standard — otherwise why have a reviewer at all? 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



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