To make those languages viable enough to survive -- much more work than just our is needed. I am sure that 10% of military budgets of the world countries for one year would preserve all languages, but that's the other issue. Basically, that's not our failure as Wikimedians, but failure of our civilization.
exactly. Well, saving languages is a very nice goal and would be great. But it wouldn't help Wikimedia´s goals. A lot of languages will be vigorously passed on to the children also still in 2050. So don't care about them? Nope, the contrary. These are exactly the languages in which a Wikipedia makes real sense. Many of them are small languages with less than 100k speakers, but still, if the right efforts are made, we could get those into Wikipedia business. But, we would need a boatload of money (yes, why not taking it from the military budgets - but who should hand it over to us ;) ) to go around the world to the speech communities and explain them how they can do it, and support them in doing it during the first years. The other languages, and it's a big majority, won't be passed on to children in 2050 anymore (or are already not passed on). Why? Because people pass to their children the language that will help them most in their life, which is probably the language they have to know to be able to go to school. And additionally, a low-prestige language is very unlikely to be passed on to the next generation, and let's be honest, there are lots of attitudes towards languages, just think about certain dialects of your own language. ;) Only if we could make it that their own heritage language is that one that helps them most in their coming life and that has enough prestige to be treated as a treasure rather than a burden, they would pass that one on to the next generation.
Th.