On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:48 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly questionable if we would even want to.
This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them becoming POV forks.
What is relatively unknown to foreigners is that even English (or any other word language as lingua franca) is preferable language for education, the most of people under ~18-20 and above 50 are very bad in that lingua franca, no matter what the region is. Simply, foreigners usually don't talk with people who don't know English (or other world language). Even we assume that the upper limit for knowing English will raise, it is hardly to assume that lower limit will go significantly down. This is especially important because pidgins (let's say, WoW or CS pidgins) locally are not translated to English and then to a native language, but directly into a native language. (To give a plastic example: "ASAP" will not be translated as "as soon as possible" and then into a local language phrase, but directly to a local language phrase.)
So, if you are able to make an internet pidgin-English project, it could work for younger. However, en.wp is not working. To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp.
Completely other question is that a very small specter of population is able to participate on en.wp, even in not so poor countries.
Other thing is inside of multilingual developing countries which decided to use English in the educational system. But, it makes another problem: significant part of population won't get even basic education if it is in foreign language (cf. literacy level in Arab and other Muslim countries, even the richest: only very rich, socialist and not so populated Libya has 82% of literacy, while not so rich [per capita] and not socialist Iran and Pakistan have 82% and 86%; even extremely rich UAE and Saudi Arabia have 79% and [around] 80%).