Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Miscellaneous/Enable wiki URL changes/Proposal/en

Translate this page

Problem: From no later than year 2006, a number of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have been trying to change their language code. However, even after more than 1.5 decades, due to a number of technical roadblocks, this is not currently possible, and the only site that have gone through such process, from be-x-old to be-tarask, is under a perpetual state of technical failures, for example Content Translation tool still fail to function properly for the wiki due to the change in code from a decade ago.
In order to fix the editing environment of such the renamed wiki, and to correct the name and language codes of all the wikis that are currently having various problems with their current name/url/language code, it is necessary to clear those long-standing technical roadblocks, and also to prevent new ones from being created.
It might be a bit too large of a project for the Community Tech team to clear all of the blockers, but there should be a number of those blockers that the Community Tech team should be able to help clear, thus making the goal of changing the name, language code, and URL of different Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects much easier.
Examples of affected site (While most of the following used Wikipedia URL as example, other non-Wikipedia sites for these languages are also being affected, and in some cases are also blocking the creation of new projects for these languages due to intention to avoid related technical troubles):

be-x-old.wikipedia.org was renamed be-tarask.wikipedia.org
There are petitions to rename no.wikipedia.org into nb.wikipedia.org, so as to reflect the site's language being Norway's Bokmål
simple.wikipedia.org should be changed to en-simple.wikipedia.org, in order to reflect it is a Wikipedia for Simple English, and comply with the language tagging standard
Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia sh.wikipedia.org currently use a language code sh. But the language code have been invalid since year 2000. The language code for the language is now hbs and proposal have been made to move the wiki to hbs.wikipedia.org accordingly.
Classical Chinese Wikipedia, currently located at zh-classical.wikipedia.org, have its own language code lzh, so it have been suggested to move to lzh.wikipedia.org.
Cantonese Wikipedia, zh-yue.wikipedia.org, being described as Wikipedia for a variant of Chinese speaking in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, and in diaspora around the world, is usually considered a language, and have its ISO language code "yue". Thus proposals have been made to remove the "zh-" and just use the standard language code for the Wikipedia's URL, turning it into yue.wikipedia.org.
Min Nan Wikipedia, aka the Wikipedia for Minnanese and Taiwanese, is now located at zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org, due to the way some classify the language. However, the language have an official language code "nan", and proposal have been made to move the site to nan.wikipedia.org, accordingly.
Swiss German Wikipedia, which have been placed under als.wikipedia.org, have since year 2005 received official language code "gsw", and is thus desirable to change the wiki's link to gsw.wikipedia.org
Syriac Wikipedia, is now currently working under another name of Aramaic Wikipedia, at arc.wikipedia.org, which is an historical language which have disappeared long ago, and is not the language of the project. It would be favorable to change its name to Syriac Wikipedia and change its link to syc.wikipedia.org, to properly reflect the language used in the Wikipedia.
Norman language from Normandy is now having a Wikipedia at nrm.wikipedia.org. Yet "nrm" is actually a language code for Narom language from Malaysia. Hence it have been proposed to change the wiki's URL from nrm.wikipedia.org to nrf.wikipedia.org to reflect the correct language code for the Norman language.
The Wikipedia for Emilian language from Italy, currently located at eml.wikipedia.org, is actually using the old language code for the combined "Emilian-Romagnol language". As the language code have been separated and Emilian language is encoded as "egl", it have been proposed to change the link to egl.wikipedia.org, although there are also opinion against such change
Võro language from Estonia, as part of the Finno-Ugrian languages, now have their Wikipedia at fiu-vro.wikipedia.org. Since the language received its own language code in 2009 as "vro", it have been desired to move the site to vro.wikipedia.org
Currently, bh.wikipedia.org is used by Wikipedia of Bhojpuri language in the Bihari languages group from India. Yet the language code "bh" have been deprecated, separating into individual language codes for each language, with Bhojpuri having the code "bho", and thus proposal have been made to move the wiki to bho.wikipedia.org, to avoid confusion with other Bihari languages.
cbk-zam.wikipedia.org is the URL for Wikipedia in Zamboangueño dialect of Chavacano language. As the dialect have been said as the only living version of the language from the Philippines, proposal have been made to move it directly to cbk.wikipedia.org representing the language.
The Wikipedia for the Eastern Baltic language of Samogitian, have received its own language code "sgs", and thus proposal have been made to move the wiki's location from the current location of bat-smg.wikipedia.org to sgs.wikipedia.org.
Aromanian Wikipedia, is currently located at roa-rup.wikipedia.org, with rup representing Aromanian language roa supposedly mean "Other romance languages", which is meaningless, and thus should be moved to simply rup.wikipedia.org.
Currently, there is an "Old Wikisource" located at www.wikisource.org. It have been proposed to rename it as Multilingual Wikisource and be moved to mul.wikisource.org, to better reflect its nature of collecting text in multiple languages that don't have their own Wikisource projects.

Proposed solution: Resolve as much bugs in phab:T172035 as possible, in accordance with the Community Tech team's capability.
Who would benefit: All readers and editors of affected wiki, all future developers of tools for the MediaWiki software, and all users of affected languages across the globe (Since Wikipedia language codes are sometimes being taken as de facto standard for languages by others far beyond just the Wikipedia itself, instead of the base BCP-47 standard, fixing these language codes will also promote fixing them everywhere else across the internet or even off the internet)
More comments: This is a resubmission of wish from 2019 Community Wishlist and based on a proposal written in the sandbox.
Phabricator tickets: phab:T172035
Proposer: C933103 (talk) 12:10, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]