basica wrote:I've been lurking unilang for quite a while and I don't think I've ever really seen much fuss over the flags and people there tend to be very interested in languages that could cause some sort of stir concerning the flags (i.e. catalan seems to be really popular). As a sort of general comment, I hope we don't let fear rule us from trying out new things - not that I am saying that this is happening, just I think that anything can have a potential downside and I don't want us to let the possibility of that cause us to rule things outright.
Well, let's see if I can explain my reaction a little bit more.
When it comes to software, I tend to be a tidy and logical person. I don't mind maintaining big, messy databases as long as there's a "correct" answer, or at least an official one. So if you want to talk about language
codes, I'm happy to geek out about the differences between the ISO 639-1, ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 standards, and talk about the best way to handle dead languages, and so on. There are actual international standards committees that work out all the messy details and hammer out a compromise. Similarly, I like Unicode—it's imperfect, but if it doesn't include your local script or a letter in your name, there's a process to get it fixed, and then everybody just goes ahead and supports Unicode everywhere.
But I really just don't want to be responsible for maintaining any kind of "official" flag <-> language mapping for the forum. That just sounds like a lot of ongoing work, and a bunch of arbitrary (and occasionally unpopular) decisions, and I personally think it looks like a big hassle, and I just don't wanna.
Now, I'm happy to consider installing
the profile BBCode extension, that would allow you to use emoticons in your profile fields, and also a flag emoticons extension (if we can use Unilang's, for example). That way, people could do whatever they wanted with flags, including using them next to the languages in their profile, without rdearman and/or the moderators having to take responsibility for making arbitrary decisions.
Personally, I'd be happy to use a French flag in my mini-profile, because I mostly speak Parisian(ish) French. On the other hand, I'm mostly interested in Mexican Spanish, so I could use a Mexican flag and not a Spanish one. Similarly, people could choose a Taiwanese or Chinese flag if they wanted. Or they could use both the national flags if they wanted, if they studied more than one national dialect.
But I really don't want the responsibility for deciding whether the forum as a whole should use a Taiwanese or Chinese flag for Mandarin. It's a silly and illogical question in the first place, and the answer is extremely political. If individual posters can make that decision on their own, the whole issue goes away.
(Of course, this all depends on finding a half-way decent extension for national flag emoticons.)