Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Archive/Add en-us as a separate language

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Add en-us as a separate language

NoN Proposes social/community change rather than a technical feature

  • Problem: The need to recognise that American (e.g. color) is not always the same as international standard English (e.g. colour). Currently many items in Wikidata are given English (en) names that are not used universally in English, but are uniquely American, and not used by (and are often detested by) English speakers in the rest of the world. Wikidata recognises en-ca for names that are uniquely Canadian and en-gb for names that are uniquely British, but does not admit the distinction of en-us for names that are uniquely American. This is a surprisingly frequent problem with the vernacular names of animals and plants, where one name is near-universal in English except for USA, where a different name is used.
  • Who would benefit: English speakers worldwide outside of the USA as reusers of Wikidata (e.g. lists of vernacular names on Commons)
  • Proposed solution: Create en-us as an additional language, so that uniquely American names can be indicated as such and no longer be passed off as universal English
  • More comments: This would help resolve the long-standing problem of American imperialism on wikidata, whereby uniquely American names are imposed as 'standard English' names on English speakers in the rest of the world (England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc., etc.) against their wishes.

Discussion[edit]

  • @Deryck Chan:It's possible for en-GB, en-CA but not for en-US or en-AU. Those would have to be added and our general process for doing so is a phabricator ticket. If there are disagreements about whether we want to add them, the forum would be somewhere on Wikidata. ChristianKl (talk) 16:17, 10 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • While I share the concern about the symptom, I'm not sure it's really a technical problem, but more an editorial one about accepted language granularity. That is, the problem surely go far beyond en-US, as I would expect that even within US you will find regional linguistic variations. Actually, even in small town you might find notable dialectal variations. So surely recognize en-US would be fine, but this wouldn't solve the underlying problem. --Psychoslave (talk) 09:20, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Having looked more into the issue, it's an issue that's entirely about policy. The Wikimedia Language Committee seems to have the opinion at the start of the year that en-US shouldn't be added. This leaves either the possibility to convince them to accept it or to change Wikidata policy to remove the jurisdiction about the decision from them. There's nothing the Community Tech Team can do about either. ChristianKl (talk) 01:20, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, this is a policy matter rather than a technical proposal. Community Tech can't work on this, so I'm going to archive the proposal. Thanks for participating in the survey. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:11, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]