February 27, 2016
REBUILDING THE TOWER:
Unless you speak English, the Internet doesn't care about you (Kristen V. Brown, February 18, 2016, Fusion)
If you are an English speaker surfing Wikipedia, there are more than 5 million articles for your perusal. English Wikipedia is a labyrinth of links that could have you clicking for years, but if you speak a different language, you might click through everything in just a couple of minutes.In Swedish, the second most popular language on the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, there are nearly 3 million articles. But if you live in neighboring Norway, there are less than half a million entries. If you are one of the 10 million people who speak Zulu, there are less than a thousand. And if your only tongue is Hiri Motu, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea, well Wikipedia probably just isn't for you: Wikipedia indexes just three articles in the language so Wikipedians closed the language's encyclopedia.
English is the metric language.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 27, 2016 7:41 AM