No, you're being very unrealistic.
What percentage of the population of Africa is fluent in English?
Ge'ez.
Mark
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:42:39 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
It is very linguistically imperialistic of you to assume that the entire population of Africa is best-served by English.
No, it is simply realistic. I'm not trying to tell people what languages they ought to know, merely observing what languages they *do* know. My goal is to get information to people in a language they can read it, not some quest to promote particular languages. If Espertanto were more successful and most of the world spoke it, I'd be happy publishing just one Wikipedia in Esperanto. As that's not the case, we have to do the next-best thing and publish in multiple languages, choosing the languages to reach as many people as possible.
See, I speak Greek fluently. Being Greek, I like the language, like speaking it, and would like it to be preserved. But it would be silly to argue that Greek ought to be one of the first languages being considered for a print version of Wikipedia. Not only are there many other languages with many more speakers, but many Greeks speak one of those other languages anyway (mostly English, with some German).
Is there any good argument for putting Greek anywhere near the top of the list of languages we ought to produce a print version of? I don't think there is---any of a number of languages (English, French, Arabic, German, Spanish, Chinese, etc.) are more useful to a much larger number of people. So why would there be a similar argument for any other language of about the same size (Greek has around ~11 million native speakers)?
The question is, basically, "what reasonable subset of the world's languages can we pick that will serve the largest number". The answer might include some languages we're not currently good at, but not that many. From what I can tell, the only languages in the top 10 whose Wikipedias are fairly inactive are Bengali and Hindi, and possibly Russian.
-Mark
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