[Lingtyp] Ethnologue goes for paid access?

[Michael Cysouw]

> On 03 Jan 2016, at 00:46, Hedvig Skirgård <hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In an attempt to link back to SIL and Ethnologue (from another topic that I initiated, I do realise): is the core issue that we are worried with here that SIL International are making their research less accessible […]

I’m worried about the status of the ISO 639-3 standard. We all know here that ISO 639-3 is far from ideal, but at least the SIL people strongly improved ISO 639-2 after decades of hard work (I’m with Matthew on this point!). Currently (and for years to come) we will have to accept the ISO 639-3 status-quo as a common frame of reference, so this standard will have to be accessible. Currently, this is not that case (see below). 

However, note that most old-fashioned ISO industry standards costs money. However, language identification is quite a different kind of standard, IMHO. Ethnologue and Glottolog should look to Unicode for a useful monetisation model (see below).

best
michael

# ====== Problem ============

The central problem is to know which ISO 639-3 code refers to which language, and this is not a simple question.

This is an example to the open-access information available through the official ISO registrar of ISO 639-3:

http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=aaa

That is completely unusable as a means of identifying  which language this is supposed to be. The Ethnologue information (behind a paywall) is better, though still far from ideal

http://www.ethnologue.com/language/aaa

Glottolog is much better, though the removal of the Ethnologue information is a problem (specifically, the alternative names from Ethnologue)

http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/ghot1243

# ====== Unicode is better ====================

Compare the situation with the Unicode Standard (which is ISO 10646). They of course have all information available online with various monetisation mechanisms (most importantly big companies who pay for commercial access).

http://www.unicode.org

All information is available from ISO too, but note that this is *much* more information than the really limited amount of ISO 639 information (which, as a standard, is really a joke):

Unicode: http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=63182

Ethnologue: http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=39534

Unicode is also freely available here directly from the ISO website:

http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html

# ======= A solution ? =============

My ideal solution (aka the Unicode-Model): make the usage of Ethnologue and Glottolog free, except for commercial purpose (CC-NC). And then actively contact big corporations to become member of the Glottolog or Ethnologue consortium for a fee, which for them will be peanuts, but will be sufficient to maintain the service for free.

To do: explain in three sentences why a big corporation should become part of such a consortium (managers won’t read more than three lines. This is no joke, this is serious!).