[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I do say that I am involved in language advocacy. I do put my money where my
mouth is. I am actively involved in promoting the localisation for
MediaWiki. The requirements for localisation have been strengthened to the
extend that some call the language committee, the "language prevention
committee". Localisation is not simple, it takes sustained effort and I am
happy to say that many people are willing to make MediaWiki this great tool
for content in so many languages.

The localisation effort is wasted on Americans because they get everything
by default anyway. There are some who appreciate the idea. I am fine with
you calling localisation an impressive waste of effort but I am happy that
there are other people who have a totally different opinion. It is those
people it is done for.

For some of the less or least languages we have a project for, they
represent a large part of the contemporary corpus for that language on the
Internet. They are created by people that belong to the language community
and consequently it is even of a scientific value.
Thanks,
    GerardM

On Jan 23, 2008 5:57 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
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