policy wrt politics (was RE: be-tarask language subtag registration form)

[C Eddie Whitehead]

Hi, Stephane, all, thanks, my comments are below.

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at yahoo.com

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote: On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 08:34:50AM -0700,
 Peter Constable 
 wrote 
 a message of 301 lines which said:

> So, what's the best policy for this list when we get requests for
> subtags that have associated political issues?

> a) Reject any request with political issues to ensure this list
> avoids politics?

Certainly not. This would give veto power to anyone in the
world. Anyone could shout "This proposal is politically wrong" and
then stall all the process.

+1. 

> b)      Evaluate any request solely on non-political criteria? 

b) is certainly a very sensible choice but:

> (We would still need to ensure that subtags are non-offensive.)

Unrealistic: even saying that Taiwan is a country (a pure fact) is
labeled "offensive" by the Chinese dictators. 

In many countries, there are similar cases (until very recently, there
was officially no Kurds in Turkey, only "Mountain Turks"; of course,
there was noone speaking kurdish - ku - for the same reason). (See for
instance
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100501939_pf.html)


Thanks for this reminder!  (I agree this is common.)
But, of course I do still think we must look to see if a subtag is offensive to anyone--although you are right we cannot automatically reject it on just that ground--
that is, if its being offensive cannot be reasonably avoided;
and if it's not offensive to any groups in  the community to which it applies;

mostly it's just not got to be offensive to speakers of the community to which it applies.

(that might be the case if we also registered the standard orthorgraphy for Belarussian--right now only the Latin is registered it seems:
one common name used to denote the standard orthography might be offensive to some users who think that the standard is the best way for the Belarussian community to go, 
while for others who are forced to read/write in the standard but do not favor it, that common name is not at all offensive)

--cew


 
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