On Jan 23, 2008 11:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, It is an irrelevant question.
To you it is, to people who have limited resources to allocate and need to consider how to best help the world it is a relevant question.
Research has shown that kids that learn to write in their mother tongue first will do better academically.
I've seen a lot of people with a very simplistic notion of "mother tongue". If you are raised simultaneously speaking multiple languages, what, exactly, is your mother tongue?
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The criteria do not consider that there is a finite number of languages that we support. Otherwise we might have had to prevent new projects in the past because they would not fit in your minimum number of languages.
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Knowing a minimum does not mandate excluding beyond that.
There is virtually no cost in putting up yet another unused, spammed, and abandoned Wiki. But there is also very little value.
I would even suggest that the languages that do not have a big reach do not cost us much but have an inverse value to their cost.
A Wikipedia with 10 or 100 articles has very little cost, but does it provide any value beyond the personal enjoyment of the people writing it? That value is probably enough, but lets be careful not to overstate it.
In my opinion good information in more languages makes what we do more valuable not less valuable.
.. but setting up a Wikis by itself does not create good information. Creating good information has a cost someone will have to pay.
There are more kinds of resources that need to be allocated than simply turning on Wikis, which is why understanding the payoff is important.
For example, on a multi-lingual project like Commons it might be a reasonable requirement that all policies, featured image descriptions, etc be translated into the top N languages at a minimum. Requiring translations into hundreds of languages would be a impressive waste of resources. By knowing the tradeoffs we can make better decisions.
I find it both informative and amusing that the people so frequently involved in language advocacy avoid this kind of hard information which would enable people who do not have linguistics and language advocacy as their primary interest to understand the material impacts of language coverage.