2008/11/30 effe iets anders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of > human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already > had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better > sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living > in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material > available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language!
English is an official language of Botswana. Quite a lot of African countries move to English or French for education above a certain level. >Even if > it only contains 1000 articles, ~102 articles currently. > you can already learn a lot from it. You can > improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the > western world. What is Tswana for mass spectrometry (looking at the translations for that term across European languages is mildly amusing) ? There are large areas where if you don't speak english you can't operate in that area. There is nothing wikimedia can do about this. Highly questionable if we would even want to. This doesn't mean we should give up on many languages but it does mean that we have to accept that the educated people from those countries may not want to use them and there is a significant risk of them becoming POV forks. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
