[Foundation-l] An observation on languages

[Maria Fanucchi]

There are some, like me, who simply do not participate in discussions
because they get technical/legal quite often, which is beyond a lot of
people, or perhaps just plain boring to them.
And there is, of course, the fact that they can often degenerate into heated
arguments. I, for one, already have enough of this kind of aggressiveness
on-wiki and don't need the added aggravation. (Just for the record, my home
wiki is fr:wp, and my maternal languages are English and Spanish.)
I still scan the e-mails to see if anything interesting is being said, and
reread some threads carefully (as is evidently the case for this one), but
these are rare occasions because sometimes both of the above situations
apply to a single thread: heated arguments about technical/legal details I
know nothing about, or just the basics.
Happy editing,
--Maria Fanucchi
(User:Arria Belli, and "Arria" on IRC.)

On 1/25/08, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I thought this wouldn't be as bad, but when I checked it does indeed
> seem the case. Looking at the most active posters of last month
> (December), I counted 41, and checked which Wikipedia should be called
> their home (I have not checked non-Wikipedia Wikimedia wikis, which at
> least three (Brian McNeil, Gerard Meijssen and Bryan Tong Minh) are
> more active on), based on frequency of recent edits.
>
> Of those 41:
> * 24 had the English wikipedia as their main wikipedia
> * 7 had another wikipedia as their main language (Daniel Arnold on
> de:, Lars Aronsson sv:, Luiz Augusto pt:, Milos Rancic sr:, Waerth
> th:, Yoni Weiden he:, effeietsanders nl:)
> * 3 were about equally active on en: and some other language (Michael
> Bimmler de:, Florence Devouard fr:, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen fi:)
> * 6 I could not identify with a Wikipedia username; 4 of those would
> probably be en: users judging from their name, the other 2 were
> unclear
> * 1 does not really have a home Wikipedia, having the majority of his
> edits on another project (Gerard Meijssen, counted as nl:)
>
> All in all, English users outnumbered other-language users by 28 to 11
> (counting the 3 doubles as other-language and the 6 unknowns as 4
> English, 2 not counted). That's slightly over 70% English users,
> whereas they're less than half of our volunteer population (as far as
> I know).
>
> As for the reasons, the fact that this list is written in English is
> an important factor. I myself read and write English quite well, but
> there will be plenty of contributors who do speak some English, but
> for whom reading in English is much more tiring than doing so in their
> own language, and writing English would be even worse.
>
> Having said that, I agree with other writers in this thread (like
> Notafish) that the high amount of often low-quality or off-topic
> replies is not a good thing, although I doubt whether it's more of a
> factor for non-English speaking people. I have been thinking whether
> it would be possible to get a lower-volume version of this list, but
> no way of making a selection that would even be a little effective
> while at the same time not leading to even more heated discussion
> seems doable.
>
> --
> Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
> ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
>
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