If we had the 347 most-spoken languages of the world covered (that is, all those languages with over 1 million speakers), we would still be missing 6% of the world.
Someone asked on this list once which tiny number of languages we could translate documents into to reach the whole world. They seem to forget the Tower of Babel - even with the 75 most-spoken languages, you're still missing 20% of humans. When you use a more convenient number like 8, you're missing a whopping 60%.[1]
Of course, all of these statistics ignore the fact that adults on Earth are only 82% literate.[2]
We have relatively good coverage of about the 100 most-spoken languages, and after that, it gradually gets spottier and spottier.
Mark
[1] http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size [2] http://earthtrends.wri.org/
On 11/08/2008, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
There is already an Arabic Wikipedia - I'm assuming its in Standard Arabic. I think Crazy Lover's point was that the native speaking audience requirement was flawed, because few people speak Standard Arabic as a native language.
I think that falls under the "exceptions can be made" rule of common sense, and the language policy itself is, I think, flexible enough to make use of a major language even if the number of native speakers is small.
This was discussed previously, but can anyone point me to the thread where GerardM and others discussed what proportion of the world's population did not have a Wikimedia project in a language they speak, and also what proportion is unrepresented with a native language project? It seems like the focus ought to be on recruiting people who speak the languages of the projects we already have, rather than tweaking our policies to get the maximum number of empty projects.
Stupid question, perhaps - I know Wikimedia projects don't accept advertising, but do we advertise ourselves? Main page banners of popular projects asking for native speakers to contribute in other projects, banners on websites of local or national popularity in areas where the number of our contributors are small, etc.? I'm thinking of the CIA's banner ads, like the one with an Arabic phrase and then an English one that says "If you can read this, and you're an American citizen, you could work for the CIA."
Nathan
On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.comwrote:
Arabic, if there are a large number of speakers and if it can be used for efficient communication between speakers of divergent dialects, would seem like a great choice for a new language project. If the language is classified as "dead" or "ancient" or if it has no "primary speakers", those factors can be taken into account, but the language needs to be evaluated from a holistic standpoint to see that it is indeed worthy of having a project.
--Andrew Whitworth
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