StackOverflow brings together millions of programmers in a collective effort. Why partition it into mutually exclusive areas of overlapping info?

Question

StackOverflow in other languages ​​is a redundancy detrimental to the global community of programmers.

A great deal of effort in the design of stackoverflow is put into detecting and eliminating redundancy, to help its users save time and effort when looking for an answer or answering a question.

What do you prefer, a great tower of Babel or hundreds of mostly overlapping replicas with a centesimal fraction of its usefulness and greatness?

As I write in Spanish, I cannot write in English.

A person who learns English has immediate access to all the existing information on the site.

Anyone can learn English. Learning English and using it as a technical language does not require more effort than learning a new programming language.

You think you're leading an effort to increase the community's scope and reach more people, but such an effort can only end up in excision.

It is an effort that harms everyone, even those who are supposed to benefit from it: As a programmer in India writes a response in Hindu that already exists in English, he or she is being kept from answering a new question. The same happens with other languages ​​and in the end we all get a fraction of what we would have if we agreed on one language for everybody. Meanwhile a significant amount of people who grew up in an environment where the only spoken language was not a popular one would still be in great disadvantage.

In short, splitting StackOverflow in different languages is the very definition of inefficiency.

It's like when a new programming language that brings nothing new comes out, but we have to learn it because some consortium has the interest and enough power to put pressure so that it becomes another de-facto standard; not only we have to redo everything that was done in the new language if we want to collaborate with the consortium, but also new creations are not made available to the pre-existing languages until someone comes and bothers to port them, multiplying the effort we have to put by N times to achieve the exact same goal.

Today the vast majority of programmers have to learn English if they want to be competent.

I hope it stays that way for long, because although like everybody else I would also prefer the official language of the programmers to be my mother tongue, I am not willing to sacrifice a global community with the means and tools for fluid communication with the least amount of noise for a fraction (no matter how significant) of what it currently is, only to express myself more comfortably or include people who are too lazy to learn how to communicate.

And now I could move on to another topic, but I have to double my efforts and waste my time to write this in Spanish to accommodate people who do not want to accommodate to what luckily is a universally accepted standard: English as the official technical language, not only in programming, but in all branches of engineering.

I only have one request regarding the language issue on stackoverflow and stackexchange sites: Please let the community flourish by being kind and offering your support and acceptance to those like me who are still learning the language and putting their best effort on improving their communication skills to be as close as possible to the rest of the community. If we give them the proper encouraging we will all end up benefiting from those who are still shredding the language but have or will have great questions and answers to contribute: If you think a question is interesting or an answer is valid but it is poorly expressed, please edit it instead of simply downvoting it.

Proposal: Stack Overflow (in Spanish)

Answer 1

Anyone can learn English. Learning English and using it as a technical language does not require more effort than learning a new programming language.

This is not true. As somebody who has learned a decent handful of both programming languages and natural languages, I can say confidently that the effort involved is not anywhere even close.

For example, C was the around the third programming language I learned, and Russian was the third natural language I learned. It took me a few weeks of tinkering around with C to be adequately productive in it, whereas it took me over a year of fairly dedicated practice and living in Russian-speaking countries to be competent enough to contribute to Stack Overflow in Russian, and even then I still make mistakes rather frequently.

Right now I'm working in China and have tried to program against some APIs that only have documentation in Chinese. I don't know Chinese very well. It's not easy. Wrapping your mind around an unfamiliar technology is often hard already, and adding in a language barrier amplifies those mental obstacles manyfold. And that's just reading information, with all the help I can get from dictionaries and automatic translators. I'm nowhere anywhere close to being able to contribute any sort technical knowledge in Chinese.

Expecting everybody to have to go through those same obstacles seems unduly cruel to me, especially for beginning programmers who already feel overwhelmed.

And now I could move on to another topic, but I have to double my efforts and waste my time to write this in Spanish to accommodate people who do not want to accommodate to what luckily is a universally accepted standard: English as the official technical language, not only in programming, but in all branches of engineering.

While English is undeniably the de-facto prevalent language for programming, there's no such thing as a universally official standard language for programming. Programmers don't belong to some organized club with rules about what language you can use; programmers can, and do, write in whatever language they want to.

And for certain technologies and services, English is decidedly not the standard language. If I had a question about programming an application integrating with the ВКонтакте API, I'm pretty sure I could find more experienced people to answer that question on the Russian Stack Overflow than I could on the English Stack Overflow. Similarly, if I need to know something about writing an app integrating with 微信, I can almost always find more information on Chinese websites than I can on the English Stack Overflow.

Different programming communities already form naturally because of language barriers. The success of the Portuguese Stack Overflow and the Russian Stack Overflow is a pretty good indication to me that not everybody is content to be confined to rely on the English Stack Overflow, including people who know English well enough to do so.

As a programmer in India writes a response in Hindu [sic] that already exists in English, he or she is being kept from answering a new question.

A separate Stack Overflow doesn't prevent anybody from doing anything. If a multilingual English/Hindi speaker has a desire to answer new questions in English on the English Stack Overflow site, they can do that as much as they like. They're perfectly free to ignore the existence of any Stack Overflow sites in other languages.

Plenty of people want to share knowledge that already exists in English in different languages so that it can be accessible to a wider audience. For example, I have written questions/answers in Russian that have already existed in English, and feel that this effort was more worthwhile than answering yet another my-website-doesn't-work-plz-help question on the English site. But when I want to answer questions in English, there's nothing stopping me from doing so.

Answer 2

Desde mi punto de vista es una idea genial, democratizar el acceso a un recurso tan valioso solo puede traer un impacto positivo en el ecosistema de desarrolladores de software y realmente en todo el ecosistema de TI.

Hay que ser más inclusivos, el hecho de que algunos tengan la facilidad de manejar más de un idioma no quiere decir que la mayoría lo tenga y de hecho en especial en latinoamerica la mayoria no tiene segunda lengua.

Esta es precisamente la razón del porqué en latinoamérica encontramos decenas de grupos de facebook dedicados a solucionar dudas de programación , la gente sencillamente no tiene donde llegar y se va al lugar menos indicado a buscar solución de sus dudas.

Para los profesionales más Senior si es habitual manejar más lenguas, pero la mayoría de la fuerza útil de programadores aún se encuentran en etapas iniciales de su desarrollo profesional.

Otros tantos colocan preguntas en pseudo-inglés y entienden la mitad de las cosas que les mencionan en las respuestas.

Hay que ser muy conscientes de la realidad del mercado y no quedarnos con una visión sesgada donde solo se incluyan a los más favorecidos.

Answer 3

Since the dawn of history the entire human knowledge is already partitioned into different areas of info and people speaking different languages can access more info than only one-language speakers. That's a big disadvantage for most part of english speakers who are not able to speak any foreign language and often confuse english knowledge with human knowledge, but that's not reason enough to avoid new knowledge exchange areas creation.

In short, splitting StackOverflow in different languages is the very definition of inefficiency

Do you think is more efficient to have a single site understandable by only 20% of world population than, let say, mandarin, spanish, russian, arab and french, 5 more sites covering 60% of world population? I don't think so since multilingual users avoid those sites to be isolated from the others.

I'd like to understand mandarin. That would bring me access to a huge amount of information, culture, ... wisdom. I can't but that's my problem, not the problem.

In short: More is better.