[Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[M. Williamson]

> priority list that they think we should use. :-)  The metrics that
> Mark suggests are a great idea.  Number of speakers, number of
> monolingual (or native) speakers, and size of the editing community
> would be great things to consider.
>
This may seem like nitpicking but I think it's an important
consideration. Number of native speakers is not a good metric if we
are trying to be practical, since the vast majority of Yoruba speakers
on the Internet are fluent in English. English bilingualism is much
more frequent in, say, the Indian internet community than it is in the
Chinese internet community. I think we should take the following
approach towards "crucial" languages:

1) Start with one language that all official documents must be in; due
to current structure of WMF, this would be English.
2) To choose the subsequent language, search for the language with the
greatest number of non-English speakers; for the sake of argument
let's say it's Spanish (although it may be Chinese in reality).
3) For the third language, search for the language with the greatest
number of people who do not speak English or language 2 (in this case,
Spanish).
4) And so on and so forth.

This cuts down on potential redundancy; of course if somebody wants to
translate all documents into Irish or Basque, we will be happy to
receive such translations. I do agree with the suggestion that we
require documents be translated into a certain (small) group of
languages. We do rely on volunteer translators, but we are not saying
"you must translate this" but rather "we will not release this to the
public until it has been translated to this language".