On 30 Sep 2011, at 13:19, Andrew West wrote:
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.
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