On 4/11/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia(a)philwelch.net> wrote:
How else, my friend, are people supposed to read the
English
Wikipedia? If we ever get around to translating en. articles to the
other language wikis, we can reorganize them there. I'm sure in the
Russian Wikipedia, the country has priority over the state.
There are a massive number of people in the world who are not "English
speakers", but can certainly read it. Hell, I work with lots of them.
English is almost certainly the most understood language in the world,
if not the most spoken as a first language.
I'm also taking a guess here, but I suspect that for some languages,
your best bet to get information would be to use machine translation
of EN Wikipedia. I'm not totally positive though, because the
languages that have machine translation on google are probably our
best Wikipedias as well (German, Spanish, French...) but maybe
Portuguese or something.
Damn I wish we had some more stats :) Especially readership stats, if
my hunch that there are silent masses reading Wikipedia from other
countries without contributing much, is correct.
Steve