On Apr 11, 2006, at 12:37 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
There are a massive number of people in the world who are not "English speakers", but can certainly read it. Hell, I work with lots of them. English is almost certainly the most understood language in the world, if not the most spoken as a first language.
I'm also taking a guess here, but I suspect that for some languages, your best bet to get information would be to use machine translation of EN Wikipedia. I'm not totally positive though, because the languages that have machine translation on google are probably our best Wikipedias as well (German, Spanish, French...) but maybe Portuguese or something.
Damn I wish we had some more stats :) Especially readership stats, if my hunch that there are silent masses reading Wikipedia from other countries without contributing much, is correct.
So we translate en. articles into other languages--and deal with the issues of non-English speakers *then*. You denounce people for being arrogant Americans because they want [[Georgia]] to be a disambiguation page, but then you suggest that non-English speakers should read Wikipedia through *machine translations of the English edition*!?