On Monday, October 3, 2011, Michael Peel wrote:
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).
The issue becomes slightly more philosophical: languages *are* a form of knowledge though. A simple argument: if I know how to express the statement "Snow is white" in English, I know one thing. If I know how to say it in German, I know two things. In either state though, when I use it, I'm still expressing only one fact about the world.
Expressing the facts is a matter of primary importance: it is important to the misson of sharing the sum of all human knowledge that we tell people whether snow is white, but we should also be sharing the more implicit, linguistic knowledge.
Basically: language is a component part of the "sum of all human knowledge", not just a means of expressing that knowledge.
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Tom Morris
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Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>