[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Jan 23, 2008 11:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> It is an irrelevant question. Research has shown that kids that learn to
> write in their mother tongue first will do better academically. As our aim
> is to provide educational content, it makes a difference to be aware of
> this.

If academic performance is your only metric then the number of
necessary Wikipedias would be far smaller then the number of necessary
Wikibooks or Wikiversity projects, since Wikipedia is not intended to
be educational. It certainly is an informative resource, but academic
performance is going to be based more on information presentation then
it is on information quantity or mere availability.

Beyond that, it ignores the fact that many small languages simply do
not have written forms to learn.

> So I disagree where you say that it is an important question I would even
> suggest that the languages that do not have a big reach do not cost us much
> but have an inverse value to their cost.

I would disagree with this suggestion, but i don't think it's
important either way. We have a goal of bringing free information to
people, but not necessarily ensuring that the information is presented
ideally. We can provide information to the near-entirety of the
world's population using a small fraction of all the world's
languages. If some people have to access information using a language
in which they are fluent but are not native, then that's a concession
that must be accepted. Attempting to support all languages of the
world is an exercise in both futility and arrogance.

--Andrew Whitworth