[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Andre Engels]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 11:32 AM, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language
>
> "It is believed that 90% of the circa 7,000 languages currently spoken in
> the world will have become extinct by 2050, as the world's language system
> has reached a crisis and is dramatically restructuring."
>
> How is Wikipedia going to affect this language disaster? WMF 2050 goals
> ideas : ) ?
>

Assuming your ideas of affecting this would be through getting projects in
these languages, I think there is very little we can or should do. The very
factors that make them likely to go extinct soon are also the factors that
make them not very suitable to inclusion in our projects: They are in the
great majority languages with a small number of speakers and without a
written tradition. They are also mostly spoken by villages and tribes that
until recently lived in relative isolation (in regions that have been
influenced by nation states for several centuries like Europe or eastern
China, most languages incapable of surviving for a few generations more have
already gone extinct). All of these seem contra-indications against having a
viable Wikimedia project. Which does not mean we should say no to them if
they knock on our door, but I think it would be a waste of resources to
actively promote them. Those resources I think would be better put to
languages that have a larger user base, but a relatively much too small
Wikimedia and general internet presence. That is, I'd rather work on getting
20 or 50 of the 1500 Niger-Congo languages to have large, useful, active
Wikipedias in 10 years than on getting 500 of them started.

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com