Open Stack Exchange to the other 80%
Something like 20% of the world population can read simple English. Stack Exchange should expand to the other 80%.
Yes, internationalization is hard. But Stack Exchange has been around for a long time. It's diversified away from being for English-speaking programmers writing about programming, to being for English-speaking programmers writing about diverse topics, and has opened up to English-speaking non-programmers. Now, very slowly, Stack Exchange is opening up to non-English-speaking programmers. Open up to the rest of the world!
6–8 years ago…
3–4 years ago…
A little over a year ago…
And still nothing coming outside of a few programming sites. And no respect for the existing communities of the sites about languages), which have all (at least the ones about non-extinct, non-artificial) been built by a small set of very persistent native speakers driven by the hope that the site would eventually open up to everyone, and not just the few who also happen to speak English well enough to participate on Stack Exchange.
In concrete terms, I'm only making some very cheap requests:
- Provide a user interface and the official documentation in all the languages of the existing sites (at the visitor's choice, of course). Cost: small, supporting a dozen languages isn't much more expensive than supporting 4.
- On each site, officially allow meta posts and chat in the site's language(s). Cost: 0.
- Allow proposals for non-English sites about topics other than programming on Area 51 (and allow them to go through if they reach the launch stage). “We can't allow T in L yet because we want to have an employee who speaks L” makes sense, “We won't allow T in L because T ≠ programming” doesn't. Cost: 0.
