[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 23, 2008 11:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> It is an irrelevant question.

To you it is, to people who have limited resources to allocate and
need to consider how to best help the world it is a relevant question.

> Research has shown that kids that learn to
> write in their mother tongue first will do better academically.

I've seen a lot of people with a very simplistic notion of "mother
tongue". If you are raised simultaneously speaking multiple languages,
what, exactly, is your mother tongue?

[snip]
> The criteria do not consider that there
> is a finite number of languages that we support. Otherwise we might have had
> to prevent new projects in the past because they would not fit in your
> minimum number of languages.
[snip]

Knowing a minimum does not mandate excluding beyond that.

There is virtually no cost in putting up yet another unused, spammed,
and abandoned Wiki.  But there is also very little value.

> I would even
> suggest that the languages that do not have a big reach do not cost us much
> but have an inverse value to their cost.

A Wikipedia with 10 or 100 articles has very little cost, but does it
provide any value beyond the personal enjoyment of the people writing
it?  That value is probably enough, but lets be careful not to
overstate it.

> In my opinion good information in more
> languages makes what we do more valuable not less valuable.

.. but setting up a Wikis by itself does not create good information.
Creating good information has a cost someone will have to pay.

There are more kinds of resources that need to be allocated than
simply turning on Wikis, which is why understanding the payoff is
important.

For example, on a multi-lingual project like Commons it might be a
reasonable requirement that all policies, featured image descriptions,
etc be translated into the top N languages at a minimum.  Requiring
translations into hundreds of languages would be a impressive waste of
resources. By knowing the tradeoffs we can make better decisions.


I find it both informative and amusing that the people so frequently
involved in language advocacy avoid this kind of hard information
which would enable people who do not have linguistics and language
advocacy as their primary interest to understand the material impacts
of language coverage.