On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Marcus Buck
<me(a)marcusbuck.org> wrote:
Andre Engels hett schreven:
nd this
configuration does make sense, in my opinion. If we
have a hypothetical language with one million oral speakers, but only a
handful of people able to write, it will still be useful to create a
written encyclopedia. Cause if you start to teach the one million
analphabets how to read, they immediately have written content
available. If there is no written content available, there is no
incentive to learn to read. It's a chicken or egg dilemma. Why are there
so few books in Breton? Cause there are so few people able to read
Breton. Why are there so few people able to read Breton? Cause there is
so few content available. (among other reasons) It's a self-energizing
effect. The more content there is, the more interest there will be.
That may be a laudable task, but it is not our task.
Are you sane? That's _exactly_ our task! Give access to information to
people, who nobody else cares about.
English Wikipedia is a great project, but almost all information in it
can be found elsewhere on the internet. There are other online
encyclopedias, databases, private and institutional websites, Google
Books. English Wikipedia is just a more convenient way to access the
information out there. It saves you time sorting out the good and bad
information on the world wide web. That's it, a convenience tool. But a
well-developed Yoruba Wikipedia or Gan Wikipedia or Sango Wikipedia or
[add in here one of hundreds of other languages] could be the only
easily accessible information resource at all. Nobody cares about giving
information access to the five million Sango speakers or the hundreds of
thousands signers. We should care! I doesn't cost us much. Well,
actually it doesn't cost us anything.
You grossly misunderstood me. What I claimed was NOT that we should
not be making information available in 'smaller' languages. What I
want to claim is that we should do so to make the *information*
available, not to help the *language* develop. Wikipedia is there to
spread the information. We should have Wikipedia in Yoruba and Sango,
not because that helps develop the Yoruba and Sango _languages_ to get
more useful and have a higher status, but because it helps the Yoruba
and Sango _speakers_ to get the information they want.