[Foundation-l] Preservation of cultural diversity and minority languages

[Lingüísta Caribólogo]

Andrew Whitworth wrote:
>Maybe I want to contribute in klingon, binary, whale song, bee dance,
>public key cryptography, pig Latin, semaphore, Egyptian heiroglyphs or
>Morse code. Maybe I want to contribute in English, but I demand to
>write everything backwards. Maybe I can find 100 friends who want to
>do the same. That doesn't make us a viable community, and the WMF
>doesnt need to respect us or welcome us or give us all a project, even
>if we make a complete localization and get an ISO code.

In this case I have a question: what makes us a viable community? What
makes the WMF respect us? Is it only a large readership who couldn't get
the information in any way other than via our project? Is this part of the WMF
mission statement, or of its philosophy?

If I can throw in my 5 cents: it would be good to make information available
to anyone in any language s/he might care to prefer. "You can use
another language" means giving people fewer choices. Perhaps even
klingon,
binary, whale song, pig Latin, Egyptian hieroglyphs... As long as it's done
by volunteers who are willing to do the job, as long as the
information is correct, accurate, and readable, and as long as its
cost is peanuts, I ask: why not?
What problem does this create? The bigger projects in the "bigger" languages
are still there and suffer nothing. Isn't it better to think in terms
of how actively
the project is generating content than in whether or not it's written
in a "good"
language with "enough" readers (assuming there are good,
not-purely-arbitrary criteria for these)?

It would seem that what's important is whether or not the project has
a good chance of having success. And if you managed to find 100
friends who do collaborate actively, then it seems to me the project
is well on its way to success. Even in klingon, Pig Latin or reversed
English.

-- Sérgio Meira