I know the pun is a stretch.

Similar to the tag constitutes a meta tag, because:

  • It's ambiguous. The programming meaning is unclear.
  • It's superfluous. The tag adds no discernible important new information to the questions that have it.

In conclusion, I propose we burninate this tag.

Related: Phase out [Farsi]

  • Could you not simply purge [Persian]? – abligh Feb 1 '16 at 11:32
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    If you search "farsi" with "html5" in Google you will get listings of many W3C pages about right to left scripts - interestingly they refer to it as Persian in their pages Quote: "Bidirectional text is commonplace in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Thaana. Numerous different languages are written with these scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, Pashto, Persian, Sindhi, Syriac, Dhivehi, Urdu, Yiddish, etc." So it is of relavence to programming. w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/index.var – Steve Feb 1 '16 at 12:22
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    This and any other language tags would be pretty useful in HTML or Unicode questions or question about language-specific encodings. – Oleg V. Volkov Feb 1 '16 at 13:21
  • They may be duplicate questions but there are many questions about UTF8 and the support, or lack of it for many languages - being able to differentiate between languages seems useful as, if I want to help someone with a problem with handling one language I might know about that one and its issues, but not another, so it would help me to narrow down my search. Mis-tagging is a different issue, but properly used it does seem to have a value. Farsi and Persian do seem to have a synonym value and although they reflect more of an historical cultural distinction they are still both widely used. – Steve Feb 1 '16 at 15:45
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    I feel like we've had a burnination attempt on a few of the RTL or locale-specific tags before...This really seems familiar to me. – Makoto Feb 1 '16 at 16:30
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    I think making it an alias for farsi is a better solution. – Gabe Sechan Feb 1 '16 at 21:25

The farsi tag is irrelevant to many questions just the same as cyrillic or traditional chinese might be. Mostly they are there to address either an encoding issue, or a writing direction issue.

However, it can help attract those who dealt with issues in that language to join discussions, as some questions tagged farsi are presumably asked by non-persian users who deliver products requiring in't to the extent it requires compatibility with farsi. It also says a certain level of understanding of that language is needed to fully understand the situation in question, whether it be a grammatically challenged problem or automatons regarding a certain type of communication.

At the same time, persian, greek or chinese become relevant in issues addressing calendars and dates, which are infact entangling tradition of date keeping with sciences like math and even astrophysics.

In the end, farsi may not be popular, but it may be helpful. In terms of technicality, persian is favorable over farsi, mainly because it refers to a whole culture rather than farsi which is just a language.

Technicality aside, I think from the tone of the discussions here, this whole thread may be considered a hate speech towards certain people.

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    I don't see hate speech here. Where would you draw the line amongst the thousands of human languages? Why do we not presently need tags for english, german, estonian, samoyed, hakka? – tripleee Feb 3 '16 at 5:58
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    To my chagrin, there is currently one question tagged as finnish. – tripleee Feb 3 '16 at 6:01
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    @tripleee - English is the default language, and you see tags for languages which have, first, significant programming communities, and second, less-than-optimal libraries. It is quite obvious that some regard popping up of two questions on Farsi/Persian as an underhanded and misinformed attack on the country. The people there aren't to blame for the policies of the government, whatever these policies may be. – Deer Hunter Feb 3 '16 at 7:21
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    One more thing to note: the distribution of tags follows power law, with some truncation on the right side. We are dealing here with the long tail, precisely what Jeff Atwood imagined. By killing the tags, you subvert the value of this site. – Deer Hunter Feb 3 '16 at 7:27
  • I still don't see any hatred here. I can understand that it is possible that some downvotes are because there are users who don't like Iran, but to me, that's a stretch. The discussion should be broadened to whether urdu, hindi, arabic, hebrew etc are useful tags or not, though. – tripleee Feb 3 '16 at 9:58
  • As well meant as your answer is, its irrelevant. The tag is a meta tag as outlined in the burnination rules, if you want to prevent a burnination, make a case against that or change the rules. – user308386 Feb 3 '16 at 14:35
  • @Magisch well the closest I could find for burnination rule through burninate-request tag wiki was this answer meta.stackexchange.com/questions/239190/when-to-burninate/… and by that it doesn't meet the criteria for burnination. Though technically different terms, I am in for making farsi a synonym for persian because persian is both used by native and non-native to this language and culture and it is in a sense has broader meaning, and already has more questions. – Cunning Feb 3 '16 at 14:57
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    @tripleee I agree that there shouldn't be any difference between any natural language. The fact is that tags are created on a per need basis. I am not sure if it hadn't happened but if nobody with privileged rights tagged a question with english, this only means nobody have felt that it might be of any help for them. Moderation should come at question levels first. A question asking English past tense grammar FSM should actually be tagged with english. The weekdays in persian or farsi should contain these tags if it is in a context of moment.js or php carbon's date manipulation. – Cunning Feb 3 '16 at 15:05


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    As I also said here: They are only relevant if the specific language-tag is important because there are additional considerations in that one. So, most of them are noise – Deduplicator Feb 1 '16 at 13:30
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    +1. I don't understand deletionists. If you want to start removing stuff related to human languages, go for ASCII and Unicode. – Deer Hunter Feb 1 '16 at 21:19
  • @DeerHunter: An upvote for saying that some language-tags might be useful, instead of showing how the one under discussion is, if it is? Well, I'm pretty accustomed to useless answers getting upvoted by now. – Deduplicator Feb 1 '16 at 23:14
  • @Deduplicator, sorry, I don't feel like explaining anything to US-ASCII cowboy bent on "slap utf8 on it - problem solved" mentality. Go read up on target language pricessing yourself BEFORE writing useless indeed suggestions like this one. – Oleg V. Volkov Feb 4 '16 at 13:26
  • @OlegV.Volkov: Why do you think I'm a US-ASCII cowboy? I'm aware that not even english can fully be expressed with that, not even speaking about my native language... If you don't want to provide any explanation, that's fine, but it doesn't make for a useful answer. Also, remember that those answers aren't only for those who bother to point out weaknesses. – Deduplicator Feb 4 '16 at 13:31

I have an alternative suggestion:

edit the tag wikis and clean up stuff that doesn't fit the rules clearly and explicitly stated in the wikis.

Example: is related to the locale, dates, numbers, character encoding, string comparison rules...

  • And how are any of those aspects of that locale so different they justify a tag? Please explain. – Deduplicator Feb 1 '16 at 23:15
  • @Deduplicator - do you do NLP programming? Do you deal with I18N regularly? – Deer Hunter Feb 1 '16 at 23:27
  • Whether I do or not has no effect on the fact that your "answer" fails to answer my question above, and is thus completely useless. – Deduplicator Feb 1 '16 at 23:29
  • Thank you. That was a rhetorical question. – Deer Hunter Feb 1 '16 at 23:43
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    @DeerHunter I think Deduplicator is saying that those questions should fall under i18n in general, and not have their own tag. – Fund Monica's Lawsuit Feb 2 '16 at 4:15

Legitimate questions that are unique to a specific natural language do exist, for example, the Unihan problem.

The majority of language-support problems are, however, generic "can't get Unicode to work" ones, with maybe some BiDi text problems thrown in. I don't think Farsi warrants a tag.

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    But would you trust a non-native speaker to make that judgment whether or not a question is generic? Because a question can certainly seem generic to someone unaware of certain subtleties. – 0xC0000022L Feb 3 '16 at 9:41
  • I would :) And I'm a non-native English speaker. My native one - Russian - does have some challenges (completely different codepages on Windows, DOS, Unix and Mac, anyone? How about the misplaced "ё"?), but one doesn't need to speak the language to appreciate and navigate around those. – Seva Alekseyev Feb 3 '16 at 13:40
  • @SevaAlekseyev: languages written in the Arabic script (or in the Perso-Arabic script), have some more challenges, e.g: letters change shape depending on context (initial, medial, final, isolated), I don't expect every user to tag those questions with something like contextual-shapes. – ninjalj Feb 3 '16 at 19:20
  • @SevaAlekseyev: well, I wouldn't, because simply put a non-native speaker would not be qualified to decide such a case either way. Not sure what you mean by misplaced "ё", since it is still in use despite often ending up written as "е" instead. Or do you mean using a Latin e with diaresis instead of the Cyrillic letter "ё"? It's not like "ѣ" which indeed fell out of use in Russian, though ... so not sure what you mean by "misplaced" here. – 0xC0000022L Feb 8 '16 at 10:26

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