From: Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au I don't think he's the one losing perspective. You can hardly compare two languages based on the number of articles in their Wikipedia editions. We currently have only 195 articles in Urdu, and I'll do whatever is necessary to support its growth into the hundreds of thousands. But a Wikipedia written in Klingon is a complete waste of time whether it has 100 articles or 100,000. You may as well write it in ROT13-encoded English. The measure of success should be information transfer, not information content.
Strongly disagreed. That point of view would make most Wikipedias wastes of time. Everyone speaking Limburgic can read Dutch better. Virtually everyone speaking Welsh, Navajo, and Maori can read English better. Everyone able to read Bambara is supposed to read French as well. Wikipedias contribute to the status of a language and the community it is spoken by. The fact that Klingon is (probably) noone's native language makes a difference, but not entirely a substantial one: it is a nice thing to have, and it can and will benefit the Klingon speaking communities which often meet and use the language quite prominently. It becomes a diiferent story when noone reads it, even when reaching a high number of articles.
Wouter
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