[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Kaare Olsen]

On Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:14:14 +0200
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of the reasons why Danish has been sluggish may be that the
> localisation of Danish was not optimal; in Februari 83.66% of the
> MediaWiki messages and 14.11% of the WMF used extensions were
> localised. This has improved to 100.00%  and 59.30% respectively ...
> compare this with Norwegian 100.00% 96.92% Nynorsk 100.00% 84.81% 
> and Swedish 100.00% 99.33%..

Gerard, that reasoning is rather far-fetched.  As you know, MediaWiki contains many messages which regular users will never be exposed to.  Even with admin (and more) access, I rarely come across anything needing translation.  We would surely have complaints galore if missing interface translations turned people away from the Danish language Wikipedia, and I've never seen a complaint about that.

I have a hunch why there is/was a comparatively low number of Danish MediaWiki message translations, but am not going to open old wounds.  Old wounds aside, another reason could be that people focus on other aspects; since most message translators to Danish are from the Danish language Wikipedia, they may not care much about messages/extensions not relevant in Wikipedia, as they feel Wikipedia is their project, not MediaWiki or Translatewiki.

What I think is the primary reason for the Danish Wikipedia being much smaller than the "neighbouring" languages is that Danes generally are internationally minded and pride themselves on being good at English - people may simply prefer to use/edit Wikipedia in that language (even I did that when first attracted to Wikipedia).

-- 
Regards, Kaare