[Wikipedia-l] Languages: crossing a border?

Mon Apr 5 15:47:46 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller wrote:
> I'd say a minimum of 10,000 active speakers is a requirement for
> creating an encyclopedia.  Neither Klingon nor Toki Pona meet that
> requirement.

Does Latin meet that requirement?  The aboriginal Sami minority in
northern Sweden, Norway and Finland numbers 85,000 people and it is
not clear to me whether they speak one language with six dialects or
six different languages.  Many wrongs have been done to these folks in
history, and I think it is fair to assume that the same goes for many
other language minorities throughout the world.  It seems unnecessary
to raise more artificial barriers.

If a Sami or Kashubian encyclopedia or one in Toki Pona is a really
bad idea, it will die or fade away from its own failure, and the
contributors cannot blame anyone else for their own failure.

> But they don't harm anyone, right? Well, they do clutter the list of
> interlanguage links, and they do have the potential to harm our reputation
> as a serious project.

If this is the problem, why not solve this problem.  Split the lists
in two or three different lists: Languages with more than 20K articles
can be considered "useful" encyclopedias, languages with 1K-20K
articles can be listed as "developing" encyclopedias, and languages
with less than 1K articles are "experimental".  Every big corporation
or organization has "experimental" projects which can fail without
risking the credibility of the whole.

Currently, eight languages have more than 20K articles (English,
German, Japanese, French, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish).
Another 26 languages have 1K-20K articles, including Esperanto,
Chinese, Hebrew, Interlingua, Basque, Latin, and Walloon.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/