[Wikipedia-l] How many wikipedians and users are actually multi-lingual?

[Karen AKA Kajikit]

By which I mean fluent enough in more than one or two languages to
contribute to the relevant wikipedia and to need to see what's going on
in more than one wikipedia at a time? 

It seems like a great suggestion to be able to access a global 'recent
changes' listing etc, but really, how much use is it to the average
user? Somebody who is monolingual, or poorly bilingual is just going to
be overwhelmed by surplus information and put off the whole project idea
if it seems like you HAVE to be a polyglot to get any sense out of it.
If you speak Japanese and Malay it's not going to be a lot of use to you
to see a listing full of French and English edits, or vice versa.

You'd be better off for the portal page to have access to each language
seperately than to try to jumble them together. Select your language
from a dropdown menu and off you go. Want recent changes in Swahili?
Choose Swahili from the language box and you'll see it. Want to check up
on the Japanese next? Switch over... etc.

I support a global login. I don't see why you should have to have
seperate logins set up for the meta and the standard english pedia AND
any other language that you may be fluent enough to be interested in. If
you want the wikipedias to be one project and not 500 then one login
ought to work for the whole kit and caboodle. 

-- 

Karen AKA Kajikit

To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir.

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