Today any individual language is mainly a cultural identity tool, as learning dominant language and using it to access and contribute (in)to available body of knowledge is much simpler (and cheaper) than preserving cultures. So the only long-term pragmatic reason for preserving and supporting Wikipedias in languages other than globally dominant language is supporting respective cultures by means of promoting accumulation and use of encyclopedic knowledge in their languages. Following this logic, in the ideal world it would seem right if Wikimedia Chapters would support all Wikipedias equally (if we assume that all languages and respective cultural knowledge matters)...

Statistics-wise, despite all the described drawbacks, https://stats.wikimedia.org/ data at least seems to have better consistency over time. So that's obviously better for benchmarking - both across language editions and chronologically. Specifically, Active contributors per Speakers seems to be a good indicator showing the unused potential in getting additional participation from every language group (as it speaks for the need of support level from respective Wikimedia National/Sub-national organization).

This led me to think that showing high level of public support to development of 27 active Wikipedias in regionally and locally recognized official languages of Russia (lucky ones to have conditions you mentioned in your previous email, below) is likely to encourage Wikimedians to engage people around in respective efforts, so I'm exploring ways to get it done in a most efficient manner (thus exploring ideas about [[meta:Wikipedia Russia]] and https://ru.wikimedia.org/. Disclaimer: My mother-tongue of Tatar is actually one of the luckiest ones in the group anyway...

List of those (and some 40 more still in incubator) is available via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_languages_of_Russia (more details in ttwiki). By the way, do you think it's Ok for me to try bringing this data on Meta (to get advantage of latter's Page translation mechanism)?

Regards,