Language Standards for Global Business
Vienna, Austria
December 14-15, 2006

Keynote Address - Using Standards - To make ends meet
Gerard Meijssen, Wikiforstandards.org

Wiki for Standards is a website created to serve as a tool to collect and discuss standards. The interesting thing is, that by setting up a website even a wiki, you follow all kinds of standards. Some of these standards are conventions; they help you expect the behaviour of a software environment. Some of the standards are editorial, these may define style, orthography or criteria of what should be part of a list.

When people create a "user" on a wiki, it is customary that some information is put on it so that people may find out something about the person that is behind it. On several of my user pages I show a picture of my "mascot" and when it makes sense, I indicate my proficiency at languages using "Babel-templates". It is a crude tool; there are five basic levels; one to four indicates real proficiency, you can indicate that you use a language professionally and, you can indicate that you speak a language as natives do.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, they use their language codes that are loosely based on ISO-639 codes, as the WMF codes can be part of any version of this standard or not part of it a tall. On WiktionaryZ, we make use of the ISO-639-3 codes. This allows us to indicate some 7602 languages. Many Babel templates were created specifically at WiktionaryZ. As Wiki for Standards is about standards, it makes sense to standardise to ISO-639-3 as well. Consequently I had to eat my own dog food and make many changes to make Wiki for Standards comply with what is after all convention indicating language proficiency.

The first occurrence of:
Wiki for Standards
WiktionaryZ
Babel -templates

The reference to my user page: http://www.wikiforstandards.org/en/index.php/User:GerardM

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