It also gives us the benefit of government support for those languages - as with, for example, the Catalan Wikipedia, which is encouraged rather a lot by the regional government. I wouldn't be surprised if the Welsh Wikipedia was the largest general reference work ever written in that language.
-----Original Message----- From: wikimediauk-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew West Sent: 30 September 2011 13:20 To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] A little wiki "hacking" On 30 September 2011 13:04, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Indeed. Part of the issue there is that the number is diminishing so > much that there aren't enough speakers left to really produce a good > encyclopaedia (there's something like 60,000 global speakers). The > problem is even more apparent when you realise that what speakers > there are tend to be a lot older than our core contributing > demographic. The whole point is that encouraging minority language wikipedias helps revitalise the language. These wikipedias will never compete with enwp for completeness, but you only need a handful of good wikipedians who are fluent in the language to be able to produce a reasonable number of good quality articles, which can have a beneficial impact on increasing language acquisition amongst the young, which in turn will tend to increase the number of contributors in that language as time goes on. Andrew [[User:BabelStone]] _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
