Fajro wrote:
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:08 PM, geni
<geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
No. You can argue for the tolerance of minority
languages but actively
promoting them conflicts with Wikimedia's stated objectives.
How?
Do you edit wikipedia to give "Free Access To All Human Knowledge"
only to the educated elite?
It seems to me that this would differ greatly depending on the minority
language. Some minority languages, despite being "minority", have
millions of monolingual speakers. Clearly if these people are going to
get Wikipedia's information without learning a new language, we need a
good Wikipedia in that language, because otherwise the information is
not available in a language they can understand.
But other minority languages have few to no monolingual speakers; some
barely have any native speakers at all. The presence or absence of a
Wikipedia in those language is more of an issue of language politics and
language preservation than actual dissemination of an encyclopedia's
contents.
-Mark