On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 7:18 AM, syrcro@gmx.de wrote:
Most WMF-Wiki contributors have none or only fair English language skills.
[[citation needed]] ;-)
I absolutely agree that WMF should continue its multilingual efforts and I consider our ability to produce so many language variants as one of our great strengths. That said, I suspect that greater than 50% of the editing community actually has decent English skills.
I'd base this supposition on two observations. One, the English language projects collectively have received 43% of all edits to all WMF projects (most of this is the English Wikipedia, of course). Secondly, even for people that primarily work in other languages, a significant fraction are likely to know English as a supplemental language. According to Wikipedia, roughly 1 in 10 people whose native tongue is not English will also know how to speak English, and I would argue that the demographics of the WMF crowd (e.g. skewed towards educated, tech savvy, first world types) would drive that ratio even higher than that.
So, putting those details together, I suspect that a majority of edits are in fact made by someone who is either working in English or would be capable of communicating in English if they needed to.be reached that way. By extension, I would suggest that around 50% of the WMF editing community is English capable.
Obviously these are crude numbers, but I think they serve as a reminder of the huge role that English plays in the WMF projects (some might even say a disproportionate role).
Of course, even if my rough argument is true, I would not want to disenfranchise the many thousands of active contributors in the other 50% or disadvantage the many smaller projects, so such arguments should not be a detriment to our translation efforts. If anything, perhaps they should be a cause for concern and an impetus to further develop other language communities so that they come to more adequately reflect the distribution of languages in the world at large.
-Robert Rohde