Timwi wrote:
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.
The distinction is routinely made in the language translation community however, it's not just a Wikipedia thing and it's not just an English language thing. It's simply that it's extremely rare for a non-native speaker to have absorbed all the culture and reflexes that inform a native speaker. For instance, a highly-educated non-native might not realize that he/she is using words that are too big to be appropriate in a particular context, or ones that passed out of common usage years ago and are now only found in books from the 1980s. Ironically, this is orthogonal to educational level and intelligence; even less-educated native speakers can pick out the foreigners, even though they might not be able to articulate what cues they are noticing.
Of course, since Babel templates are self-assigned, they say as much about ego and confidence as about actual linguistic skill.
Stan