seth hett schreven: 
Hi and 'gudn tach'!

On Tue, June 29, 2010 12:37, Marcus Buck wrote:
  
Andre Koopal hett schreven:
    
The solution we mostly take is to answer in dutch or swedish or
something :-)

      
Wow, how mature... Hoe durven ze geen Engels te spreken?

If River Tarnell does not speak German and recommends using English if
people want to get a quick answer from him without one of River's
co-admins being interpreter, that's of course okay. But intentionally
being unhelpful to people who in good faith use their native language
(which in the case of German will be understood on this list) is just
offensive and arrogant.
    

On the other hand you could call someone offensive or arrogant (or at
least not-thinking-enough), if he uses his small native language in an
international project.
Interesting that you call it an 'international' project. That is technically true, but Wikimedia does not involve 'nations' or 'countries' but rather 'language communities'. So the more appropiate adjective would be 'multilingual'. And if you replace 'international project' with 'multilingual project' in your sentence it doesn't sound that meaningful anymore, does it?
Of course, in most cases none of them is really arrogant or maliciously
offensive.
Arrogance and offensiveness rarely involve real maliciousness. Many people act in good faith while being arrogant and offensive. They just don't realize their rude behaviour.
If someone replies in Swedish on a German request, one could
take it as nothing but a joke and a hint 'try using the common language,
please!', which mostly will be English, nowadays.
This "common language" is spoken by less than a quarter of the world population. If we only count decent English it's more like 10%.

If somebody asks a question in a non-English language what would happen in the optimal case:
a) one of the other list members knows the language, knows the answer, answers the answer in the non-English language and adds a sentence in English telling the other list members what he answered (so they can make addenda if necessary which will be translated into the non-English language)
b) one of the other list members knows the language, but doesn't know the answer: He acts as a interpreter between the original poster and the list
c) none of the list members knows the language: if some time has passed and noone has initiated a) or b) one of the list members answers the question with something like "Apparently nobody speaks X, perhaps you could try to ask in English so more people can understand your question." Either the original poster speaks English and asks in English or he doesn't speak English. In the latter case he's lost but at least the list tried to help without making jokes about him.

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox