[Foundation-l] Priorities

Wed Oct 24 18:01:22 UTC 2007

On 10/24/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
[snip]
>  It is a part of the core to make knowledge available
> to everyone in his or her own language.
[snip]

Actually,
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision

And what exactly would "own language" mean for a person who must use a
word-wide language like French in order to speak to people in his own
country?

> Diverting funds to that end for
> an endangered language is not contrary to our mission.

If we must speak of doing something to save a dying language it is...

We should speak about educating people.  As soon as you've forgotten
about the people and focused on the languages you've gone off track
with respect to the mission.

Mathias Damour <mathias.damour at laposte.net> wrote:
> You should consider that the main cost being writing articles, it is not
> only made for but _by_ one language speakers.
> I would go further and say that it's not only the fact to have the
> content (articles) available to read that helps to "save" a language but
> the very work to write them as well.
[snip]
> Did anyone but you told about people being paid rather than being
> volunteer to edit small language Wikipedia ?

Thats exactly what has been advocated.  It's being advocated by some
that the focus of the Foundation's spending should be to pay people to
create content in languages which are dying, because the WP's in those
languages are too small to be useful.

If this isn't your position, then we have no reason to argue. :)

Unlike some of the folks around here I haven't argued that English
Wikipedia should be the only one. :) Nor have I argued that we should
educate the rest of the world only by teaching them english and giving
them ENWP.   ... But where people already know, or are rapidly
learning an established world wide language, our efforts are best
spent making sure those resources are excellent rather than trying to
redo our work in the dozen local languages which we may find in
parallel to a world-wide language in a particular country.

Having open Wikipedia sites in many small languages, even indisputably
dead ones, is a fairly low cost exercise. I support it.  If people
want to write in a Wikipedia for a dying language.. thats great, or at
least harmless.

But to go on and say "X wikipedia is too small, we need to sponsor its
development" when X wikipedia is small because people would rather
write and read French, Portuguese, or English than X is an error it
terms of fulfilling the mission and vision (see above).