[Mageia-discuss] IRC community channels - need a ruling from the board

[Marc Paré]

>
> I don't know if we do need channels for geographic locations. E.g. there is a
> channel #mageia-de which - in my opinion is for all people speaking German. I
> don't think separate channels for Germans, Austrians and Swiss would make
> sense.
> The reason for having those "sub channels" is, that people can speak in their
> own language...
>
> Oliver
>

The ISO country codes were devised for such situations. The recognized 
German language code is now "ger" as seen by the ISO Country code 
charts. It used to be "de", however, "ger" is more representative of the 
spoken language and not of the country code and is now accepted as the 
language code for the german language.. In this case, if you are 
observing the ISO standard, #mageia-de signifies a German (country) 
channel. To represent the language, #mageia-ger would be representative 
of the german language speaking users. So, for example, where I live, it 
is a german-speaking community, Oktoberfest in Waterloo Canada is about 
to begin. The german-speaking community interested in speaking on an Irc 
Mageia channel would then look for #mageia-ger channel.

It is a shame when we clamour for W3C and document standards adherence 
to then dis-regard the use of ISO country and language standards.

Marc