I'm sorry if I come across as agressive and disagreable. I agree that Commons is a mutli-lingual and multi-cultural project, and this makes for a lot of the joy it procures me. Multi-lingual does not mean that people all speak several common languages. I means that they speak different, non-compatible languages. Having them understand each other is *more* of a problem, no less of it.
However, luckily, there's English, which is widely spoken and understood to at least basic levels. English allows me not only to save the tediousness of reading Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and several other languages that I can understand partially with effort, but also to understand people whose language I do not understand at all, like Arabic, Russian, Chinese.
- on the Wiki, "Trotsky" is written "ôÒÏÃËÉÊ". To me this is not a problem, because we have *redirects*.
- on the IRC, people can speak several languages, because they frequently engage in person-to-person discussion. In this case, it makes sense to use the language that both people master the best
- On the mailing list, on the other hand
* there are no redirect or automated translation systems
* messages are, per definition, addressed to everybody.
In this sense, in my opinion, it makes about as much sense to start using a language that few understand than it would to send encrypted messages for which one single person has the key.
Being cautious about exactitude when speaking of political matters is commendable, and I wish that this state of mind was more widespread. However, in this case, it strikes me as evident that non-Spanish speakers will either understand nothing to the message, or understand it with the gross approximations that Santiago Becerra Carrillo seems to keen to avoid.
-- Rama