if i cannot understand a posting, it diminishes the information i am able to glean from perl monks.

I think you missed the part about bridge building. Yeah, most people post in English, but realistically should someone who wants to learn Perl, but does not quite have a good enough grasp of the English language to feel confident to post in English, be chastised for asking for help. If someone asks for help, regardless of language, they should be helped (and then let the bridge builders do their work, for the benifit of all.)

If there are many such postings, while they may be of intrinsic worth, i will just tend to switch off, more and more. like i do from my old spam-ridden email accounts. i will choose a medium less polluted by things i can make no sense of

If you know of (or find) a better medium for discussing Perl than PerlMonks, then I am sure you will not be the only one moving along to greener pastures. (I do like the language optional display of nodes). I also think, (hopefully not mistakenly), that nodes of great "intrinsic" worth would be high on the priority list for translation. In the end I don't really believe that you would notice a decrease in the amount of information you can glean from this site.

likewise, can you imagine cb, if it were continually interspersed with comments you could not understand?

I am almost certain that at times I have noticed a good amount of nonEnglish scrolling by on the CB. Nothing exessive, but had it become that, there is the option of "/ignore"ing those who are doing it, so I don't think it would be a problem there as well.

perl itself is rooted in english to an extend it is hard to get away from; the pod is rooted in english, the source comments are in english - i find it odd that advocating, as Vennis has done, that the same should apply to perlmonks

I agree, it is rooted in English, but that should not mean that we cannot extend a hand to those who are not fluent enough in English to post (or confident that they will understand an answer given back to them in English.)

Besides, with the knowledge they are likely to get in their native tongue, they are likely to wonder what other wonderful information is hidden away in English on this site and in time, gain enough knowledge of English to be able glean the knowledge posted here throughout the years. (and then they will be the bridge builders of tomorrow.. community is IMHO a lot of what Perl(Monks) is about.)

-enlil

thank you for this intelligent & measured commentary, in which there is nothing i really object to. in particular, i like your last point re: how it may encourage those who do not speak, and i wholeheartedly agree that community is what perl monks is about.

at present it is emphatically not a problem, and you are right in that /ignore could be practically used and modified to deal with other cases. i do not propose censoring anything, i merely think it worth recommending posts be in english. why?

my fear stems from the case in which non-english postings rise to a level where there become 'english', 'french' and 'german' perl monk sites, independent of each other. with the monastery divided, no-one bothers to translate posts they consider minor, the number of potentially useful nuggets in the information mine - for the community in general, not just english speakers - becomes less, and we are all left the poorer.

regards,

wufnik

-- in the world of the mules there are no rules

Well, in that case, instead of forcing others to write English, you could learn German.

Abigail

if i cannot understand a posting, it diminishes the information i am able to glean from perl monks.

if i cannot understand a posting, it diminishes the information i am able to glean from perl monks. if there are many such postings, while they may be of intrinsic worth, i will just tend to switch off, more and more. like i do from my old spam-ridden email accounts.

Each posting on perlmonks about CGI, or about Windows issues diminishes the information I glean from Perlmonks, because I've no interest in them. If there would be too many of such postings, I'd spend less and less time on Perlmonks.

I don't have a problem with that. I'm not going to argue that because I don't like CGI or Windows, Perlmonks should have a policy not to accept such postings. At best I could argue Perlmonks should have some filtering options. Or I could run a local newsserver, hack together a perlmonks to NNTP gateway and use a newsreader that does have such filtering ability.

But I don't think Perlmonks is there for me, or that the prospect of me leaving results in a policy change.

Abigail

likewise, can you imagine cb, if it were continually interspersed with comments you could not understand?

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law