"Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
[…]
On a more practical and less ideological note, I
should note that even
though I didn't run the numbers, I strongly suspect that translating 10,000
articles to 100 languages is considerably cheaper than teaching 7 billion
people English.
Definitely, but your argument was:
| […]
| If there is no substantial Wikipedia in such a language, these people can't
| read Wikipedia in *any language* because they are monolingual. Most likely
| they cannot read any any encyclopedia in any language. They need a
| Wikipedia not in order to preserve the language, but to have access to
| *any* encyclopedic knowledge.
| […]
A large part of humanity *has* access to a reasonably main-
tained Wikipedia in a language they understand, not to speak
of traditional encyclopedias in schools and libraries.
Then of course there is the more fundamental problem: If
those 100,000 monolingual speakers do not speak other lan-
guages, have no access to encyclopedias, etc., how do they
interact with a computer now, which web sites do they visit,
etc.?
I just have a very hard time to imagine a community of
100,000 people under those circumstances who are only held
back by not having access to a Wikipedia. On the contrary,
this reminds me very much of traditional development prac-
tices where third world countries always seem to urgently
need to buy what first world countries have to sell. IMHO,
there is a considerable risk that this creates unhealthy de-
pendencies.
Tim