Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

John Yunker has an interesting observation about why Wikipedia is so successful as a multlingual site:

How Wikipedia Manages Multilingual Content Expectations. Going Global: Adventures in Web globalization and all that it entails

Not only does it offer content in more than 100 languages, it does a good job of managing content expectations.

It does not hide how much content it offers in each language. In fact, it tells you upfront how many articles it offers, such as 168,000+ articles in Swedish and 143,000+ articles in Português.

This is really true. It doesn’t take much reflection to agree that it’s annoying to come across a website language options that turns out to have only a few pages in the language. I for one would like to know what the relative proportions are of multilingual content on multinational sites like Deutsche Welle.

For Blogamundo, the information I’m most curious to see is just which pairs of languages people choose to translate between. As far as I know that sort of information isn’t terribly easy to come by. We’ll make it as accessible as we can, here.