[WikiEN-l] Babel template en-5

[Timwi]

Hi.

Preliminary:  This posting is *NOT* meant to re-incite a discussion that 
has already taken place and is already over: namely, the debates about 
the deletion of [[Template:User en-5]] and its equivalents for other 
languages.

I just wanted to note one thing that struck me as significant and no-one 
else seems to have brought this up anywhere in the discussion (the AfD 
discussion; I haven't followed the mailing list):

The entire discussion blatantly reflects the stereotypical 
English-speakers' language ignorance, which postulates that a native 
speaker is necessarily "perfect" or "best", and a non-native speaker is 
necessarily worse than a native speaker. The entire discussion assumes 
that "native speaker" is an adequate label for a level of skill.

In reality, most non-native English speakers I know speak and write 
English way better than an average native speaker. In reality, among all 
speakers (native or non-native) there are huge variations in the level 
of skill, ranging from "lolz asl?" to Pulitzer-prize winning prose. It 
is *that* which the Babel templates are trying to gauge, *not* whether 
someone is a native speaker or not.

Timwi