On 30 Sep 2011, at 13:19, Andrew West wrote:
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.
I have to admit (from a completely personal viewpoint) that this sounds like a reason
_not_ to support minority language Wikipedias. I personally much prefer the trend towards
more people speaking a single language, or set of main languages, rather than encouraging
more small niches of people speaking their own language. The former makes it a lot easier
to communicate with more people on a global basis and hence gain more knowledge, whereas
the latter does the complete opposite.
For me, the key points are increasing the availability of knowledge for those that only
understand that language; increasing the body of knowledge that's shared between
multiple languages to make it easier to learn a more common language; and to preserve
information & culture specific to that language (which, of course, would ideally also
be translated to other languages).
Mike