At 11:21 AM 10/1/02 +0100, Khendon wrote:
On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 10:29:36AM +0100, tarquin wrote:
That is a very US-centric attitute (or English-centric, your pick). There are whole swathes of the internet which don't speak English. And you've inadvertently demonstrated one of the reasons they split from the main Wikipedia site.
Well, *one* of the two groups is going to have to speak the other's language. Why not use English as the common language?
Then by the same argument, why not use Spanish?
Because if you have to pick one, it makes sense to pick the one that people are most likely to know. There's no bigotry involved, it's simple numbers.
It may not be bigotry, but I suspect a certain amount of English-centrism or simple laziness: it's easy to argue that other people should use my language, rather than me using theirs, because that will make my life easier.
Or would I be wrong in thinking that the proportion of Spanish-speaking people who also speak English is much higher than the proportion of English-speaking people who also speak Spanish?
I have no idea. But it doesn't matter. In the real world of trying to solve this, we *know* that the people who started EL are offended by the English-centric approach. (By sheer numbers I could justify editing all articles on the assumption that people are female, because a majority of humans are.) They left because they felt excluded. We want to urge them to rejoin. Demanding that they use English for a negotiation that we want and they don't seem to won't accomplish anything useful.