At 12:11 AM 8/27/03 -0400, Merritt Perkins wrote:
What languages? All languages! Do you mean that you
want to include
Encyclopedia articles on all languages. There are so many obscure
languages that you cannot expect to include them all.
What languages should the Encyclopedia be translated into? I think that
you should choose languages that would have many readers.
Because of how Wikipedia works, we have encyclopedias in the languages
that volunteers want to work in.
High German,
French and Spanish for example. There is a difference between this French
spoken in France and in Canada, in the Spanish spoken in Spain and in
Mexico. There are special characters used to write the languages.
Basque, Maori, and Manx would have few readers. The language should be
easily written from a computer keyboard. This would exclude Arabic and
Chinese. There must be some way to write them but I don't know how. It
may require a special keyboard and software.
We already have Arabic and Chinese Wikipedias. I certainly can't support
any approach that rules out two of the most-used languages on the planet.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr(a)redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org