Hi.
Preliminary: This posting is *NOT* meant to re-incite a discussion that has already taken place and is already over: namely, the debates about the deletion of [[Template:User en-5]] and its equivalents for other languages.
I just wanted to note one thing that struck me as significant and no-one else seems to have brought this up anywhere in the discussion (the AfD discussion; I haven't followed the mailing list):
The entire discussion blatantly reflects the stereotypical English-speakers' language ignorance, which postulates that a native speaker is necessarily "perfect" or "best", and a non-native speaker is necessarily worse than a native speaker. The entire discussion assumes that "native speaker" is an adequate label for a level of skill.
In reality, most non-native English speakers I know speak and write English way better than an average native speaker. In reality, among all speakers (native or non-native) there are huge variations in the level of skill, ranging from "lolz asl?" to Pulitzer-prize winning prose. It is *that* which the Babel templates are trying to gauge, *not* whether someone is a native speaker or not.
Timwi