Daniel Mayer wrote:
A great deal of information and cultural heritage is contained in the language itself. This goes way beyond what any set of articles in other languages can ever hope to accomplish.
I might agree, but disagree that a Wikipedia-produced encyclopedia in the language effectively captures it. Does the Latin Wikipedia properly capture the cultural heritage of Latin, for example, or merely the perspective of English, German, French and other speakers writing Latin as a second language? More importantly, does having a new article on quantum mechanics written in Latin contribute anything that the extant corpus of Latin writing doesn't?
I think preserving languages is an interesting aim, but something separate from writing an encyclopedia. Even in cases like Hopi where the extant writing is much less extensive than Latin, it's not clear to me that writing an encyclopedia in Hopi is the best way to preserve it---is translating [[en:Milwaukee, Wisconsin]] to Hopi more useful than, say, writing original literature or poetry in the language in terms of preserving the language? It's clearly not very useful in terms of communicating information about Milwaukee itself to anyone, because nobody who wanted to know about Milwaukee would look there first...
-Mark