[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

[Delirium]

Mark Williamson wrote:

>For example, does creating a Hopi Wikipedia (assuming that we had
>already found committed people to build it) when there are only just
>over 40 monolingual speakers DIRECTLY further the goal of the project,
>or is it a sideline to it since the vast majority of the speakers of
>this language are nearly equally served by an English Wikipedia?
>(although, at least in Arizona, English fluency in Native American
>communities is often exaggerated and when somebody "speaks English",
>at least if they're old, it often means that they know a few words as
>opposed to none at all)
>  
>
I obviously speak only for myself here, not Jimbo, but IMO promoting 
minority languages is separate from the main goal.  The goal of creating 
an *encyclopedia* is to get information to people, in a language-neutral 
way.  The only importance of any language in that context is that the 
encyclopedia needs to be available in enough languages so that everyone, 
or at least as many people as possible, can access information in a 
language they feel comfortable using---only creating an English 
encyclopedia, for example, would leave out in the cold people who don't 
understand English well enough to make good use of it.

For languages where there are few to no people for whom it's the 
preferred language (like, say, Latin), creating an encyclopedia in that 
language doesn't really get information to people that they couldn't get 
otherwise.  Indeed, I'm not sure anybody at all would look first for 
information in a Latin encyclopedia rather than their native language.

That doesn't mean I oppose those encyclopedias, because all things 
considered, the cost of hosting them is minimal, so if people want to 
work on a Latin encyclopedia, there's not much reason to tell them they 
can't.  (I might draw the line at conlangs other than Esperanto.)  But I 
don't think they really fit into the goal of spreading *information*.

Producing a Hopi encyclopedia would still be interesting, even if there 
are few to no Hopi speakers who can't get their information in some 
other language, so I see no reason not to do so, and quite a few reasons 
why it might be good to do it.  But it's sort of a separate goal---it 
doesn't fulfill the goal of getting information to people that they 
couldn't otherwise access.

-Mark