On Apr 11, 2006, at 12:37 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
There are a massive number of people in the world who
are not "English
speakers", but can certainly read it. Hell, I work with lots of them.
English is almost certainly the most understood language in the world,
if not the most spoken as a first language.
I'm also taking a guess here, but I suspect that for some languages,
your best bet to get information would be to use machine translation
of EN Wikipedia. I'm not totally positive though, because the
languages that have machine translation on google are probably our
best Wikipedias as well (German, Spanish, French...) but maybe
Portuguese or something.
Damn I wish we had some more stats :) Especially readership stats, if
my hunch that there are silent masses reading Wikipedia from other
countries without contributing much, is correct.
So we translate en. articles into other languages--and deal with the
issues of non-English speakers *then*. You denounce people for being
arrogant Americans because they want [[Georgia]] to be a
disambiguation page, but then you suggest that non-English speakers
should read Wikipedia through *machine translations of the English
edition*!?
--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch