It also gives us the benefit of government support for those languages - as
with, for example, the Catalan Wikipedia, which is encouraged rather a lot
by the regional government. I wouldn't be surprised if the Welsh Wikipedia
was the largest general reference work ever written in that language.
-----Original Message-----
From: wikimediauk-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew West
Sent: 30 September 2011 13:20
To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] A little wiki "hacking"
On 30 September 2011 13:04, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Indeed. Part of the issue there is that the number is diminishing so
much that there aren't enough speakers left to really produce a good
encyclopaedia (there's something like 60,000 global speakers). The
problem is even more apparent when you realise that what speakers
there are tend to be a lot older than our core contributing
demographic.
The whole point is that encouraging minority language wikipedias helps
revitalise the language. These wikipedias will never compete with
enwp for completeness, but you only need a handful of good wikipedians
who are fluent in the language to be able to produce a reasonable
number of good quality articles, which can have a beneficial impact on
increasing language acquisition amongst the young, which in turn will
tend to increase the number of contributors in that language as time
goes on.
Andrew
[[User:BabelStone]]
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