[Foundation-l] Promoting non-en Wikipedias (was In defence of Google)

[Lars Aronsson]

Delirium wrote:

> English has around 350 million native speakers, and over 1.5 
> billion total speakers; Greek has fewer than 15 million total 
> speakers.  To overcome that disparity in number of speakers 
> requires a *huge* popularity among the speakers who do exist.

This problem does exist, but the limit is not drawn anywhere near 
15 million speakers.  Languages with 15,000 speakers *do* have a 
problem.  Faroese with 45,000 speakers (2124 articles) and 
Icelandic with 300,000 speakers (12,955 articles) have a slow 
start. Estonian with 1.5 million speakers is doing just fine 
(29,240 articles).  All of these languages/countries (including 
Greece) are part of the western, (post-)industrial, wealthy, free 
world, so they do not have the handicap of poverty, illiteracy or 
censorship.

Users from Greece could visit Estonia to meet some wikipedians 
there and see how they are dealing with the problems of being a 
small nation.  However, each nation tends to look only to their 
bigger neighbors (Germany, France, USA) and not the smaller ones.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se