One thing that troubles me slightly with this conversation is that I think
there is a presumption that people will naturally choose to read and write
Wikipedia in their native language, but that isn't necessarily so.
Anecdotally it seems many people read English Wikipedia because precisely it
is larger and more comprehensive (obviously they must have a reasonable
ability to read English). And I would imagine that this is true too for,
say, Catalan, where one might imagine they would also know Spanish and might
well turn to the larger Spanish Wikipedia most of the time. Generally
speaking, speakers of "small" languages (meaning small populations of native
speakers) are likely to speak one or more "larger" language and therefore
may preferentially read Wikipedia in those "larger" languages in order to
have a broader and deeper array of content. As I don't speak any "small"
languages myself, I do not know if those Wikipedias tend to cover the more
general topics or whether there is a greater focus on local content unlikely
to be covered in "larger" Wikipedias - does anyone know?
If this is true about reading Wikipedia, then it seems likely to flow over
into writing Wikipedia as well. Writing for the "larger" language has the
benefit of bringing information to more people. So, here, motivation for
editing comes into play. I suspect people who write for the "small" language
Wikipedias probably have a motivation to keep their language alive, whereas
this is unlikely to be a consideration for the large languages. But OTOH if
you write for Wikipedia because you are passionate about sharing your
knowledge of a topic area (e.g. Pokemon, football, cactus), then it seems
that you would write in the Wikipedia with the largest content base on that
topic (within your linguistic abilities) as you would have more to build on
and a larger community of other editors to work with. Of course, working
with others on Wikipedia isn't always easy, and perhaps that might be a
factor that might drive an editor to write in a "smaller" language Wikipedia
(which might be more work, but with less conflict).
What I don't know is whether any of these issues are microscopic or
macroscopic. If they are macroscopic, then they have to be factored into the
model of "how a Wikipedia should develop".
My personal view is that the "extremely small" language Wikipedias are
unlikely to achieve a broad coverage of general topics because they are
unlikely to find a large enough editor community. I think they will
underperform whatever level of development they might theoretically be
capable of. My rationale is that we know that Wikipedia is written
predominantly by people with higher than average levels of education, which
almost certainly means you have had to learn one or more larger languages to
do this, thus opening up the ability to work with other Wikipedis, thus
siphoning off some proportion of the editor base to boost the development of
larger Wikipedias at the expense of their native-language Wikipedia. I think
it is more realistic to focus on more local content in small language
Wikipedias and leave the more general content to the larger Wikipedias.
Note, this is all written on the assumption of not using machine
translation. Clearly with machine translation, there is far greater
potential for content in languages for which there are machine translation
tools. But again, machine translation is less likely to be available for the
"very small" languages, so even in that scenario, I think the smaller
language Wikipedias will miss out on the content.
Kerry