Re: [Ietf-languages] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: language variant subtag "tongyong" addition request (for Chinese langugaes romanization)

[David Starner <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 11:22 AM Hugh Paterson <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Does adding information to Wikipedia help ease the acceptance of new tags?
> are IETF decisions based on Wikiality?.
>  Wikiality: the idea that “any user can change any entry, and if enough
> users (editors) agree with them it becomes true.”
>

As opposed to EB, where for the article on conjuring for the 13th edition,
the author focused on the amazing stunts of Harry Houdini... who also
happened to be the author. Much like the 10th edition, which was written
by John Nevil Maskelyne, and focused on John Nevil Maskelyne. The
Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography is notorious for having over
two hundred fake biographies hidden among the real ones.

SIL is hardly invulnerable here, either. According to the Ethnologue,
Esperanto has 2,001,000 speakers. Why? Well, there's no actual cite, but if
one searches Google, which is itself pretty Wikiality, Wandel 2015 might
refer to an article that extrapolates from Facebook rather sketchily. If
you go to Wikipedia, you would find some discussion of how many speakers
there are, with full cites, that would inform you much more accurately of
the range of estimates.

The advantages of having one person write the article, and one editor check
it, are known, but letting two people declare something true isn't
inherently better than letting enough editors declare something true. And
Wikipedia is pretty much the only freely-accessible encyclopedia that
covers the subjects we need to refer to.