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

Wed Feb 23 07:23:23 UTC 2005

No, you're being very unrealistic.

What percentage of the population of Africa is fluent in English?

Ge'ez.

Mark

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:42:39 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> 
> >It is very linguistically imperialistic of you to assume that the
> >entire population of Africa is best-served by English.
> >
> >
> No, it is simply realistic.  I'm not trying to tell people what
> languages they ought to know, merely observing what languages they *do*
> know.  My goal is to get information to people in a language they can
> read it, not some quest to promote particular languages.  If Espertanto
> were more successful and most of the world spoke it, I'd be happy
> publishing just one Wikipedia in Esperanto.  As that's not the case, we
> have to do the next-best thing and publish in multiple languages,
> choosing the languages to reach as many people as possible.
> 
> See, I speak Greek fluently.  Being Greek, I like the language, like
> speaking it, and would like it to be preserved.  But it would be silly
> to argue that Greek ought to be one of the first languages being
> considered for a print version of Wikipedia.  Not only are there many
> other languages with many more speakers, but many Greeks speak one of
> those other languages anyway (mostly English, with some German).
> 
> Is there any good argument for putting Greek anywhere near the top of
> the list of languages we ought to produce a print version of?  I don't
> think there is---any of a number of languages (English, French, Arabic,
> German, Spanish, Chinese, etc.) are more useful to a much larger number
> of people.  So why would there be a similar argument for any other
> language of about the same size (Greek has around ~11 million native
> speakers)?
> 
> The question is, basically, "what reasonable subset of the world's
> languages can we pick that will serve the largest number".  The answer
> might include some languages we're not currently good at, but not that
> many.  From what I can tell, the only languages in the top 10 whose
> Wikipedias are fairly inactive are Bengali and Hindi, and possibly Russian.
> 
> -Mark
> 
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