[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Day 4 Fund Drive Report (updated)

Wed Feb 23 06:23:20 UTC 2005

You have a very distorted view of linguistic diversity in Africa.

First of all, while there are definitely more than 500 languages in
Africa, there are only 10 or 20 with over 1 million speakers.

It is very linguistically imperialistic of you to assume that the
entire population of Africa is best-served by English.

Mark

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:16:12 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> 
> >For that matter, in the computerless world, even languages such as
> >German and French and Spanish are relatively rare. We are talking here
> >about targeting entire continents such as Africa which are best served
> >by native-language content which we cannot currently provide in any
> >way shape or form. We have growing Arabic and Afrikaans Wikipedias, a
> >minimal Swahili Wikipedia, just beginning Wolof, Bambara, Zulu,
> >Somali, and Amharic Wikipedias, and can already obviously provide
> >English, French, and Portuguese-language content for those Africans
> >who can speak these languages fluently.
> >
> >
> I'd question that: I think Africa is "best served" by whatever content
> the most people can read, which is likely to be English.  Even expanding
> to say, four languages, the best choices are likely to be English,
> French, Arabic, and Swahili (although I can't find very good statistics
> on this).  Unless you have a plan to simultaneously publish editions in
> 500 different languages, publishing in the major languages---i.e. those
> that the most people are able to make use of---seems like the best plan.
> 
> -Mark
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>