[Wikipedia-l] Re: Jimbo interview on NPR Friday?

[Anthere]

Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me.

But, reading them, I thought of asking a question.


 > 4.  Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
 > English-speaking regions.  There is little or no need for most US
 > citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life.  While this
 > may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and that
 > being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little
 > attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time.  The
 > same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of
 > notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a large
 > number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages
 > largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much of
 > Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in the
 > US.  This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on
 > Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty
 > much through no fault of their own.


Since you are focusing more on an american perspective, though english 
is the only official language in the usa, many more or less recent 
immigrants only poorly manage english.

When I lived in Arizona, I was in the part of the city most inhabited by 
  teachers and students, as it was the city where the university was 
located (Tempe).

However, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in two other 
cities located in the south and east, essentially because the medical 
center and the children care center was located in east (Mesa) and the 
hospital in the south (Chandler, where my son finally born).

Admittedly, most cheap clothes and most cheap cars were also in Mesa, 
which is also why it was a key area for me :-)

However, what was striking is that most of this area was inhabited by 
mexican immigrants, some legal and some illegal; and many of them did 
not manage english well, or even not at all, as they only recently came in.

I particularly remember supermarkets entirely in spanish (which was easy 
to manage for me), but also a supermarket entirely in chinese near my 
appartment (which was much harder to manage :-)).

I went to a church in that area as well, it was a bit different approach 
from the way we usually practice religion in France, but it was better 
than nothing (I am catholic). Many catholics there were from Mexico or 
San Salvador. And some of the meetings were in spanish to address their 
needs. The church also organised some courses for them, to try to help 
them manage better in english (sort of adult courses of english).

Most of those families listened to radio station in spanish or watched 
tv in english. The kids got integrated amazingly quickly thanks to 
school (french people would do well to understand how americans can 
integrate immigrants so quickly), but it was much tougher for adults and 
most of time these were poorly educated immigrants.


So, my question is this one, and it is addressed to spanish editors as 
much as english ones. Do you know how much impact the spanish wikipedia 
has amongst spanish speakers in the usa ? Are they participants amongst 
rather recently immigrated people ? Do you know if there were some 
articles on wikipedia in spanish speaking american press (I suppose 
there is press in spanish) ? Or radio interviews ?


I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the spanish 
editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine american. Are 
they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is their 
representation in the USA media ?

Ant