[Foundation-l] Priorities

[GerardM]

Hoi,
There are some 100,000,000 people in Bangladesh, some 70,561,000 people in
India, some 23,602 in Nepal and some 600 people who according to Ethnologue
speak Bengali. So Gregory, you do not need to shout and Bengali is alive and
well thank you very much. Where you to know something about the Bangla
language, you would know that is was the repression of the Bangla language
that lead to the creation of the state of Bangladesh.

I dare you to explain how the preservation of a language can come at the
expense of the people that need it. I could as easily say that this
imperialistic tendency to promote a language like English over others comes
at the expense of bringing education to people.

There are scientific studies that prove that when people that sign as their
mother tongue will have improved academic results when they first learn to
write their mother tongue and only then learn to read and write the dominant
language that surrounds them.

These "dying" languages are the mother tongue for people. These people will
do better academically when they first learn to read and write their
language in stead of being pressed to learn a foreign language. Really you
got it all backwards. We need to promote and invest in Wikipedias in as many
languages as possible. It will have more impact then investing a similar
amount of money in the English language Wikipedia. There are many volunteers
that are willing to make these improvements anyway. But when investing in
the ElW, it just does not give us the same return.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 10/23/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/23/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Success is relative. The English language Wikipedia will not aid the
> > survival of the English language. Consider that the Bangla Wikipedia is
> the
>
> The purpose of Wikimedia is not "TO SAVE DYING LANGUAGES"
>
> If we happen to do so in our effort to help educate the world, fine.
> But preserving languages should never come at the expense of bringing
> education to people who need it.
>
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