Daniel Mayer wrote:
A great deal of information and cultural heritage is
contained in the language
itself. This goes way beyond what any set of articles in other languages can
ever hope to accomplish.
I might agree, but disagree that a Wikipedia-produced encyclopedia in
the language effectively captures it. Does the Latin Wikipedia properly
capture the cultural heritage of Latin, for example, or merely the
perspective of English, German, French and other speakers writing Latin
as a second language? More importantly, does having a new article on
quantum mechanics written in Latin contribute anything that the extant
corpus of Latin writing doesn't?
I think preserving languages is an interesting aim, but something
separate from writing an encyclopedia. Even in cases like Hopi where
the extant writing is much less extensive than Latin, it's not clear to
me that writing an encyclopedia in Hopi is the best way to preserve
it---is translating [[en:Milwaukee, Wisconsin]] to Hopi more useful
than, say, writing original literature or poetry in the language in
terms of preserving the language? It's clearly not very useful in terms
of communicating information about Milwaukee itself to anyone, because
nobody who wanted to know about Milwaukee would look there first...
-Mark