You are free to read only those posts whose language you understand.

Yes, just as you can "just press delete" when you get a nasty piece of spam in your inbox. This defense has been widely used (and widely disporoved every time). However, it is fundamentally wrong to force content down the throat of your users.

That out of the way, here are some half-cooked thoughts...

English is not my first language, spanish is. However, we have to deal with the fact that (for now at least) english is the technical lingua franca on the Internet.

People writing software in Perl need to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of english, as most documentation exists in that language. Would the lack of this restriction increase the audience for this site and perhaps Perl in general? Likely, yes. However, your proposal does not seem to bode well with the way in which this site is run.

Go back and take a look at some (already lengthy) posts (for example, this tutorial of mine).Now imagine what keeping things in sync between versions in two languages, would mean... I know it, because I run two sites that are essentially bilingual, and that is very tiresome. In the long run I believe authors would simply reduce their posting or do so in only one language.

You half convinced me.

I agree that we need some support from the perlmonks system to separate langauges. It would be very confusing at least to have nodes of several languages mixed.

I agree that we can't translate documentation to all languages, that would be impossible.

However, many questions posted on perlmonks are one-time questions that no-one will want to look back later. I think it wouldn't hurt if these are asked in the monk's native tongue, especially if he doesn't know English well (there are lots of people like that, belive me). Of course, these questions will not be as effective as asking in English, because much less people will read them. However, for beginners who want to learn Perl, this would be an option, as some of those people will probably still be able to give an answer.

Well, this is what I thought at first, but you really made me uncertain. I belive more and more that this solution wouldn't work. People wouldn't read the non-English questions, because they will most probably be beginner's question, and because few other people will read their answers.

Maybe it's indeed better to leave perlmonks as a pure-English monastery, and leave this kind of support for non-English mailing lists.

Sure I am.

But as long as there's no way to clearly separate those posts (for instance, seeing only the ones in a given language), it will hurt, because it will provide noise.

Having a couple of posts in a different language might not make a difference, but having 50% posts in that situation (believe me, it could happen) would provide a lot of noise.

Yes, I agree. We would need some mechanism to separate them.

Even among those languages you understand, it could be more convenient to separate posts (as an option of course).

73, 32, 100, 111, 110, 39, 116, 32, 101, 118, 101, 110, 32, 115, 101, 
+101, 32, 116, 104, 101, 32, 99, 111, 100, 101, 46, 32, 65, 108, 108, 
+32, 73, 32, 115, 101, 101, 32, 105, 115, 32, 66, 108, 111, 110, 100, 
+101, 44, 32, 66, 114, 117, 110, 101, 116, 116, 101, 44, 32, 82, 101, 
+100, 104, 101, 97, 100, 46, 46, 46
[download]

Again, it would only cause a problem if you had to switch between English and your native tongue quickly. As I see, this is not the main problem.