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>Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles? Because most people can't read English. If the world's best encyclopaedia was only availa
by M2Ys4U 12y ago
>Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles?
Because most people can't read English.
If the world's best encyclopaedia was only available in Swahili, would you still be asking "Why actually spend all this effort on localised articles?", assuming of course that you're not a Swahili speaker.
- lucb1e 12y agoIf almost everyone in the developed world spoke Swahili, it seems pretty reasonable to say that.
- emilsundberg 12y agoWhat? Wikipedia is for everyone. Most of the worlds population does not speak english. As a swede I use both swedish and english Wikipedia. It depends on what I'm looking at. Swedish Wikipedia contains more in depth content on a lot of topics.
- _delirium 12y ago> Because most people can't read English. That's a good argument for some languages, but for Swedish in particular it's less strong, because the number of people who can read Swedish but not read English is fairly small, and rapidly declining. That doesn't mean there's no point to a Swedish Wikipedia, but whatever point there is can't really be because Swedes are unable to read English. That's also true of Danish, which is one reason I believe the Danish Wikipedia has been languishing. There are many Danish people who are Wikipedians, but many of them do more English editing than Danish editing. The Swedish Wikipedia seems to be more active in comparison. It would be interesting to understand why; is it just the population difference (9.5m vs. 5.5m)?