[Wikipedia-l] Languages

[Vicki Rosenzweig]

At 12:11 AM 8/27/03 -0400, Merritt Perkins wrote:
>What languages? All languages! Do you mean that you want to include
>Encyclopedia articles on all languages. There are so many obscure
>languages that you cannot expect to include them all.
>What languages should the Encyclopedia be translated into? I think that
>you should choose languages that would have many readers.

Because of how Wikipedia works, we have encyclopedias in the languages
that volunteers want to work in.

>  High German,
>French and Spanish for example. There is a difference between this French
>spoken in France and in Canada, in the Spanish spoken in Spain and in
>Mexico. There are special characters used to write the languages.
>Basque, Maori, and Manx would have few readers. The language should be
>easily written from a computer keyboard. This would exclude Arabic and
>Chinese. There must be some way to write them but I don't know how. It
>may require a special keyboard and software.

We already have Arabic and Chinese Wikipedias. I certainly can't support
any approach that rules out two of the most-used languages on the planet.
-- 
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org