On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 11:32 AM, emijrp <emi...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language > > "It is believed that 90% of the circa 7,000 languages currently spoken in > the world will have become extinct by 2050, as the world's language system > has reached a crisis and is dramatically restructuring." > > How is Wikipedia going to affect this language disaster? WMF 2050 goals > ideas : ) ? >
Assuming your ideas of affecting this would be through getting projects in these languages, I think there is very little we can or should do. The very factors that make them likely to go extinct soon are also the factors that make them not very suitable to inclusion in our projects: They are in the great majority languages with a small number of speakers and without a written tradition. They are also mostly spoken by villages and tribes that until recently lived in relative isolation (in regions that have been influenced by nation states for several centuries like Europe or eastern China, most languages incapable of surviving for a few generations more have already gone extinct). All of these seem contra-indications against having a viable Wikimedia project. Which does not mean we should say no to them if they knock on our door, but I think it would be a waste of resources to actively promote them. Those resources I think would be better put to languages that have a larger user base, but a relatively much too small Wikimedia and general internet presence. That is, I'd rather work on getting 20 or 50 of the 1500 Niger-Congo languages to have large, useful, active Wikipedias in 10 years than on getting 500 of them started. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l