Have you forgotten that these are WIKIS we are talking about? It's not just a matter of translation: the technology isn't there to do it automatically and we don't have the manpower do it manually. Even if the technology were there, it's a WIKI. Unlike your friend's translations, our content can drastically deteriorate and become useless overnight if nobody's watching it.
CM
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:58:54 +0100 From: gerard.meijssen@gmail.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, EMC2 is a company who sells storage solutions to big companies. I was at a presentation of their documentation manager. He informed his audience that the people who buy their products invariably state that they prefer the English documentation. They always get the translations as well. The benefit to EMC2 is that they sell more products. The translation of their documentation adds pennies to the pound in costs, costs that are easily offset by the increased sales.
The point is that people understand things better when they are addressed in their own language EVEN when they can read the language that is foreign to them. Thanks, GerardM
2008/11/30 geni geniice@gmail.com
2008/11/30 effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com:
Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work
of
human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are
living
in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little
material
available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language!
English is an official language of Botswana. Quite a lot of African countries move to English or French for education above a certain level.
Even if it only contains 1000 articles,
~102 articles currently.
you can already learn a lot from it. You can improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the western world.
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.
-- geni
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