in reply to Non-English posts on Perlmonks
Let's set aside for a moment, all of the various comments that have been made for/against the ability/value of having non-english posts on PerlMonks.
Instead, let's consider three possibilities...
- There is a strong concensus that non-english posts are bad, and shouldn't be allowed.
- There is a strong concensus that non-english posts are good, and should be allowed.
- There is no strong concensus about non-english posts.
...
1) Bad
In the first scenerio, there isn't much that can be done to prevent non-english posts that isn't allready possible. We could add an "All Posts Must Be In English" disclaimer, but that's about it -- you can allready recommend any node you think is "bad" for consideration, and if enough people agree it will get reaped. Short of writting an AI to analyze posts for non english words (which would be harder then hell since it would have to recognize perl as well) there's not a lot that can be done.
2) Good
Here's were i can see some potentially code changes being made to Perlmonks ... if all posts had a "language" pull down you could select from, such that all nodes were labeled with their langauge, and User Prefrences could be added such that you could say "only show me nodes in these languages" or "list nodes in other langauges, but don't bother showing me the body" then there could in fact be lots of overlapping Perlmonks communities with everybody being able to seek/give help in languages they wre comfortable in, and no one being bconfused by languages they didn't understand.
Short of making a change like that, i don't see anything else that can really be done ... people can post whatever they want right now ... so they could still keep on doing that.
3) "Eh"
This is what i consider the most likely scenerio ... in general, I don't think people feel strongly enough either way -- don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't some passionate people on this issue, I'm just saying that I don't expect you to find enough critical mass to go about advocating a ban on all non-english posts, nor do i expect to see a lot of patches submitted to support language preferences on posts.
I expect that most people are happy to just let others post in whatever language they want. and if you do't understand a particular post ... just ignore it, and maybe someone else will post a translation later (hell -- there are a lot of posts in english that i don't udnerstand, usually because the problem/code is so compltely outside the scope of what i deal with on a day to day basis)
However -- there's nothing to stop you from "Considering" a non-english node if you feel that it's non-englishness makes it work being removed ... if enough people agree with you it will happen.
What more could you ask for?
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