[Foundation-l] Sakha Wikipedia passed 7000 articles

[Mark Williamson]

I hope nobody gets the impression that I'm just an American sniping at
Europeans. I wouldn't be much happier if it was half Americans and
half Europeans, or even all Americans. The majority of the world's
non-endangered languages are spoken in Asia and Africa, so on a
committee that deals with languages it strikes me as absurd that there
would be 0 representation from these places.

As far as applauding the fact that there is a single person on the
committee who spent most of his life in Israel, I hope you'll excuse
me if I'm not clapping. Having a single member out of 13 that lives
outside Europe/US is not especially encouraging to me, it seems more
like tokenism.

Yaroslav, Europe does have dozens of languages, but it lags behind
literally other continent:

Continent - # of languages - % of world's languages
Africa - 2110 - 30.5%
Americas - 993 - 14.4%
Asia - 2,322 - 33.6%
Europe - 234 - 3.4%
Pacific - 1,250 - 18.1%

Let's keep that in mind here.

-m.

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
> Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:
>>> 2) Eurocentrism. Not an accusation to be made lightly, but look at the
>>> geographic composition of the langcom. 9/13 members currently reside
>>> in Europe, another is originally from Europe, 2 from Canada and 1 from
>>> California. Hmm... so the population of Europe is 10% of the Earth's
>>> population, but (nearly) 100% of the population of the LangCom? This
>>> is a huge bias and should not be tolerated within an organization such
>>> as ours which pretends to have an international scope.
>>>
>>> -m.
>>>
>>
>> I guess if 75% of the members were from the US nobody would ever complain.
>>
> Hardly. It's not as if there have been no complaints ever about a
> majority of the board being from the US. It would be better if both the
> Americans and the Europeans would cut back on sniping at each other,
> acknowledge that it's unhealthy for either of them to be so
> disproportionately represented, and focus their energies on recruiting
> more people who add real cognitive diversity. That's part of what the
> board and the foundation are trying to do in the context of the
> strategic plan.
>
> --Michael Snow
>
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