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@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew West Sent: 30 September 2011 13:20 To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] A little wiki "hacking"
On 30 September 2011 13:04, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@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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