Thank you for the answers.
Jay Walsh, 17/12/2011 19:29:
The languages chosen were a balance between our
geographic priorities
(Brazil, Middle East, India) and our widest base of donors and contributors
from other countries. It's imperfect, as always - we want to do more in
the future, but we needed to get started.
I'm not saying you should have translated to more languages, I
understand the constraints; I was just wondering how the priority was
defined.
I had thought of the geographic priorities, not of the donors and
contributors base. However, I'm still quite confused: for instance
Russian projects have way more active users than the Japanese and almost
the same as the French (with twice as many speakers); Italian projects
have a bit less but Italy, Zack said, is the second biggest source of
donations to WMF this year.
These choices are by no means
part of a permanent pattern for WMF in terms of translation.
It can be a coincidence, anyway in the future sharing your "algorithm"
(which is something difficult to make and I suppose cost you some
thinking) would help everybody define variations suitable for their
purposes and make other choices like this. :-)
Nemo