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