What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee? Hopi speakers make up 0.002% of the population of the US. This isn't very big, but it's not very small, either. If you consider it at a state level, just over 0.1% of the population of Arizona speaks Hopi. Over 5800 people total speak Hopi (about 1000 of them living outside of Arizona), including a number of monolinguals. In one generation, this number is expected to increase rather than decrease, although with the deaths of "baby boomers" while the number will go down, the percentage is expected to go up. Nearly all 5800 people speak Hopi "better" than they speak English, and literacy in Hopi is high (especially when compared with, say, Navajo). This is not to say that none of these people have advanced English skills, just that for almost all of them speak English as their second language. This is a language that people still use regularly, it is a language with radio broadcasts and publications in it, it is a language which some people still use more than they use English and which for thousands is a collection of the words which come before all else. In the case of a language such as Winnebago (no, it's not the language of people who live in trailers), which has been extinct for a while, the prospect of an encyclopedia is much more questionable. That's not the question I'm asking here. We aren't talking about a language which is no longer used or spoken. Also please keep in mind that "minority language" includes any language not spoken by the majority - thus, Catalan is a minority language in Spain although it has over 8 million speakers, Telugu is a minority language in India although it has over 20 million speakers, but in the same vein Hopi is a minority language in Arizona with just under 6 thousand speakers, and Havasupai is a minority language in Arizona with 580 speakers (550 in Arizona, or 0.012% of Arizonans), although Havasupai is spoken by every single member of the Havasupai nation. Thus we are not talking about language preservation exactly, but rather building an encyclopaedia in a minority language as an aid to the continued existance of the language - Havasupai is used in schools, as is Hopi, and with Wikipedias in these languages there would be a vast body of written knowledge available to educators and to learners alike, and people would have access to information in their first language. What some people seem to be thinking of is a Wikipedia in a language with barely any or no remaining speakers as a sort of work of art. This is also an important concept, but there are obviously many more differing viewpoints here and the exact situation would differ from language to language. However that isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Mark On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:13:22 -0500, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 21:03:39 -0500, Stirling Newberry <stirling.newberry(a)xigenics.net> wrote: "Private hobby horses"? We're talking about languages that are spoken by real people, not just hobbies. It is not my responsibility or anybody's for that matter to make sure any one person's needs are being met. I am more concerned about the needs of minority language speakers. I think that an English-speaker's needs are being met by the project much better currently than a Sinhala speaker (national language of Srilanka) or a Hopi speaker. If you are concerned about the "vast majority of our readers", then you can go ahead and take care of their needs if you are so interested in doing that and feel it's not already being done. If you want to start a thread about some sort of need of the "vast majority of our readers", you are quite welcome to. There are no restrictions on this list about "Thou shalt post exclusively regarding the Vast Majority of Thy Readers" or "Thou shalt post exclusively regarding the Minority Languages". So quit whinging about these needs that we are supposedly not discussing or taking care of enough and start a thread on these "shortcomings". I'm going to have to say to this, "Duh." Stating the painfully obvious. "Importance" cannot be objectively measured. Any definition of "importance" that ties it down to any one measurable trait will obviously be hotly disputed. That's your POV. If you want more discussions on "major languages"' Wikipedias, go ahead and initiate some. Quit whinging about how we talk too much about minority languages and too little about majority languages, and start some discussions. I don't see how NPOV applies to majority vs. minority languages. Our goal is to provide an open-content encyclopaedia usable by every single person on earth, gratis. Quite a while ago, Jimbo added to this goal the additional goal of neutrality (and as has been shown, not everybody even agrees on what is neutral) If it is to be usable by everybody, this means we cannot simply ignore minority languages. I don't have the statistics right here, but a very significant percentage of human beings speak languages with less than 1 million speakers as their native language. This is largely in Africa, Central America, Indonesia, New Guinea, India, and other undeveloped areas, but even developed areas have their fair share of minority languages, mostly with less than 1m speakers but sometimes with more (Catalan, Galician, Sardinian, &c). Now, if you want to propose that we delete all minority language Wikipedias, you are welcome to do so but you will definitely not have much support because some of our largest Wikipedias are in minority languages - Catalan, Kurdish, Tatar, Basque, Welsh... Mark

On Mar 10, 2005, at 5:33 AM, David Gerard wrote: No, I'm pointing out that the discussion here has lopsidedly been involved with issues that are of interest to small groups of readers, rather than the large group of readers. And there is a limited amount of discussion bandwidth, therefore a zero sum situation is in effect. The question "what if someone wants to read in Hopi" is much less of a problem then "what if someone wants to read comprehensive and unbiased articles." If the wikiprocess is working, then there will be writers for where there are readers, that is, in fact, one of the things wikipedia offers: readers for writers.