[Foundation-l] Priorities

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 10/24/07, Dmcdevit <dmcdevit at cox.net> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > But if we reach a point where language preservation is being
> > advocated as a core part of the foundation's mission and when some
> > people are advocating that funding be diverted from the true
> > educational mission we will need to put a stop to that.
>
> Languages are part of the mission of education, not just the vehicle for
> it. Have you heard, we have a project with the lofty mission of
> encompassing all words in all languages? ;-)

Go go Wiktionary advocacy. Oh well it's better than hearing Omegawiki
propaganda. ;)

Certainly every significant language, including long dead ones, should
be well covered in our educational materials. But this is a complete
tangent.

The argument being made is that we must somehow prop up the
construction of Wikipedia in dying languages even at an extreme cost
in order to preserve them.

I reject this notion because educating people is our mission, not
improving the viability of dying languages.

I don't think that people understand the immense cost involved. The
Wikipedias in dying langauges are tiny because the labor needed to
make them comprehensive does not exist in volunteer form. ... which
should not be shocking, since if *a language is dying people will not
be excited about writing in it*.

In a month's time a million people will edit English Wikipedia at
least once. There are 20,000 'frequent contributors' by reasonable
metrics.  None of them are on the foundation payroll.

There are more people who effectively work full time on our largest
projects than *speak* some of the dying languages we have projects in.

There is an enormous manpower cost in creating a usable and
comprehensive Wikipedia. Due to the volunteer nature of the project we
do not see this cost but it still exists.

When we talk about using Wikimedia funding to preserve dying
languages, which don't have the volunteer pools needed to build
Wikipedia naturally, we are talking about bringing that huge cost on
to the foundation.   It just can't work... and it is not desirable.