[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

Mon Jul 11 11:00:53 UTC 2011

2011/7/11 Thomas Goldammer <thogol at googlemail.com>
>
> It won't be possible to save languages going extinct. Even if two or
> three people start writing a Wikipedia in such a language, it will die
> out as a spoken language, eventually, not later than it would without
> a Wikipedia. I think it's nice to have a corpus of encyclopedic
> articles in such languages, but more important for the goal of
> Wikimedia to make knowledge accessible to all people of the world, is
> that there is a useful Wikipedia in at least one language any given
> person can read. I would estimate that we won't ever reach 300 (open)
> Wikipedia language versions, because many of the smaller ones will be
> closed sooner or later due to permanent inactivity, and that's
> perfectly fine.

I'll never lose hope that we'll have a full-blown encyclopedia in each
of the 7,000 languages, but even if we won't, it's still very much in
the scope of Wikimedia's mission to have full collections of free
texts in all of them - folk tales, religious texts, any spoken
recordings, whatever. So for many languages a WikiSource project may
be even more relevant than an encyclopedia.