User:Tim Pierce/Drafts/On Renaming User Language Categories

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Background[edit]

Among the Wikipedia projects is something known as Babel, a framework for Wikipedians to organize themselves by language:

User language templates aid multilingual communication by making it easier to contact someone who speaks a certain language.

The Babel user language templates give users a mechanism to identify what languages they know, and how well. When a Wikipedian placing a template like {{User es}} on their user page, a userbox is added to the page identifying them as a Spanish language speaker, and they are added to Category:User es so that other Wikipedians can find a list of users who speak Spanish. It's a clever idea.