[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> You can attempt a weighted cost comparison:    Num_interwiki_users *
> Cost_of_hiding   vs   Everyone_else * Cost_of_clutter.    But even
> that will inevitably lead to bad conclusions for some issues because
> the costs are usually not linear things:   A tiny benefit to a hundred
> million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for
> a hundred thousand,  ... because a zillion tiny benefits can often
> never really offset a smaller number of big costs.

They can't?  Why not?