On 7/11/05, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
Māori is certainly not the only Wikipedia doing this. http://kn.wikipedia.org/ also has English in its site notice and that project has many native speakers of Kannada and is about to reach 1000 articles. http://gu.wikipedia.org and others do the same. The Arabic village pump contains an English introduction, and the early discussion in the project was mostly English (http://ar.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project:%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%86/%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B4%D9%8A%D9%81&oldid=10984).
Thank you for pointing this out. The Nahuatl wikipedia likewise has a good bit of both Spanish and English. (you can see the 100th "article" here, just a Spanish stub: http://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaloc ; I imagine node would argue for deleting or blanking it, but I only added interlanguage links to highlight the existence of much better Spanish content. Eventually a "needs translation" tag should be devised. [when was the first such tag used on en?] )
Every small project grows and finds initial contributors in its own way; I'm not sure it would be wise to impose some universal rules on how new languages should go about this.
This debate about whether non-local (english, french, spanish) content should be allowed to help seed new articles feels a lot like the debates about whether or not to allow substubs to exist. I find both types of seed content useful for small projects.