[Wikipedia-l] Languages

Wed Aug 27 04:37:19 UTC 2003

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 00:11:07 -0400, Merritt L. Perkins 
<mlperkins3 at juno.com> gave utterance to the following:

> 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?

You will find a list of the languages that wikipedians consider important 
enough to have devoted time to at 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_coordination

> I think that
> you should choose languages that would have many readers. 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.

The various language wikis are mainly contributed to by native speakers, 
who usually have the appropriate language version of their OS, but there 
are IME's available for CJK writing systems for English windows, for 
example. We have Chinese students living with us, and believe me, they are 
just as fast at communicating by typing as English is. (Each glyph takes 
about 5 keystrokes to enter, but often represents an entire word.

> I find no objection to including articles written or translated into
> Icelandic, Hungarian, or any other language even though there would be
> few readers. Readers need to know where to find them

Include? You will find articles in those languages in the appropriate 
wikipedias, therefore it is extremely easy for readers to find them. THe 
main page of every wikipedia has links to all the others, and when there 
are equivalent articles on a topic in other languages, these are also 
interlinked.
I find your post curious - it seems as though you are contributing to this 
list without having actually explored the wikipedia site to discover how 
it works.

-- 
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried