Do the benefits of having SO in multiple languages outweigh the risks involved?

Question

I recently visited area51 for the first time and was disturbed to see proposals for Stack Overflow variants in other languages dominating the site.

• Turkish
• Spanish
• Russian
• Portuguese

I'll admit that seeing these worries me greatly. What is the reasoning behind allowing international variants of Stack Overflow? I understand it might be easier for non-native speakers, but it risks fragmenting our knowledgebase over multiple languages and segregating our users. Is this really the proper approach when English is, essentially, programming's lingua franca?

There has been discussion in the past relating to non-English Stack Exchange sites:

• How can I propose a non-English site?
• Should Spanish SO ( and all the similar variants) be closed?

And many outstanding points have been made on the subject:

• Stack Exchange's Non-English Question Policy
• The Ugly American Programmer by Jeff Atwood
• A wonderfully thought out answer in support of multiple SO language variants
• A wonderful answer on the topic of Non-English posts on Stack Overflow

But I'm still rather curious. Why are we suddenly forgoing Stack Exchange's Non-English Policy in favor of fracturing our userbase?

As an afterthought: A great comment was posted by Emrakul (Actually that entire comment thread is lovely. Read it.) on the answer found just above.

We need to see charts of activity by country to gauge how many people this would bleed away from the main site. My guess is, it's a lot more than you'd expect.

Does this information actually exist anywhere? It would be amazingly useful/interesting if it has been made available to Stack Exchange users.

A Note: I've tried to cite as many great discussion items as I can on the subject. Quite a bit of information exists on alternate language variants, but, to my knowledge, this question has never been directly asked.

In summary, the question asks "Why should language variants be allowed?" and "Does the reward really outweigh the risk of dividing our user and knowledge bases?". NOT "Is it okay to be proposing these sites?", "Should these questions be closed?", or "Does Stack Exchange support sites in languages other than English?" (all things which have already been asked).

Answer 1

"Why should language variants be allowed?"

Because there is an audience for them. It's really as simple as that. If a site graduates, there is an audience sizeable enough that a site like that is sustainable.

"Does the reward really outweigh the risk of dividing our user and knowledge bases".

In my opinion that greatly exaggerates the risk. I've already commented on that in one of the questions you link (yeah, should have really made that an answer at some point):

I don't even think we'd lose users (to a significant extent). Those who do speak English will still come to SO. Don't underestimate the power of that site. And perhaps they will also participate on the site whose language they speak as well. I don't see those as mutually exclusive activities.

and

If they successfully participate on Stack Overflow, which is a huge quality resource with more activity than any proposed site is likely to have, why would a site in a different language cause an exodus? If they have a difficult time participating on an English language site, maybe, but then you'd have to wonder if it's so bad for them to find their support elsewhere. I don't see all Dutch users move to an SO in Dutch. I know I wouldn't.

as well as

If a large section of those Chinese users has difficulty with the language, you can fret all you want about the number of visitors going down, but it might well increase the overall quality of SO, require less community support such as editing, and additionally provide that group of users with an excellent set of resources as well. I see only wins here...

In the end I think it will be beneficial to some extent to both the users whose grasp of the English language is not all that great, as well as Stack Overflow who might see some users leave, but overall quality increase.

Answer 2

What risks?

Since you posit that there is a risk, it's up to you to say what you think the risk is. Do the benefits of allowing users to post images outweigh the risks involved? Do the benefits of allowing claims that Java is a real programming language outweigh the risks involved? Do the benefits of allowing teen moderators outweigh the benefits involved? Do the benefits of allowing users whose name begins with Z to ask questions outweigh the risks involved?

it risks fragmenting our knowledgebase over multiple languages and segregating our users.

In your whole question, this is the one line that explains your position. That's not much to go on.

Why do you think that having SO-like sites in other languages would fragments the knowledge base of SO? Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of programmers in the world¹:

1. Those who are comfortable participating on a site in English. They won't be affected by the existence of SO in other languages.
2. Those who can read English but not express themselves. They can benefit from SO, but they can't contribute.
3. Those who can't speak English at all. They can't even benefit from SO.

Creating SO sites in other languages will drive programmers of type 2 away from SO. But they weren't contributing to SO in the first place, so SO isn't losing anything by it.

A slew of unwarranted assumptions

A lot of the claims in your question are plain wrong.

English is, essentially, the world's lingua franca

That is true (for programmers — programmers tend to be better at English than the average profession), but only to some extent. There are many type 3 programmers, and even more type 2 programmers. Of course, you don't tend to meet them on SO or other English language venues: the language excludes them.

If you search the web a little, you will find forums about programming in Chinese and French and Russian and Portuguese and other languages. There are clearly people who do want to converse about programming in languages other than English.

Why are we suddenly forgoing Stack Exchange's Non-English Policy in favor of fracturing our userbase?

Stack Exchange has never had a non-English policy. It is rather bizarre that you should make this claim, considering that you cited an official post by Stack Exchange founder Joel Spolsky stating that there is no such policy:

it is OK to propose new sites in other languages. (…) For example: (…)

• Programming (in Russian)

The non-English question policy is for the existing sites. Stack Overflow is English-only. As Stack Overflow founder Jeff Atwood put it:

It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to be the one place in the world for all programming information in every possible human language.

All of this applies to Stack Overflow and the other sites of the original trilogy. SO was and is about programming, in English. Stack Exchange is a different thing altogether: SE sites can be about any subject, in any language.

We need to see charts of activity by country to gauge how many people this would bleed away from the main site. My guess is, it's a lot more than you'd expect.

I have no idea how many people Emrakul expects to find, but that number is irrelevant anyway. How would charts of activity by country tell you anything? The people who are participating on SO now aren't going to stop if there are sites in other languages. The ones who are on SO now are the ones who are comfortable enough with participating in English. Most of them are going to stay. SO in other languages is largely intended for the people who are not participating on SO now, because they can't.

Your follow-up questions

Why should language variants be allowed?

Why not? You've yet to explain why they shouldn't be. And as you acknowledge, there's an official policy that they are allowed.

Does the reward really outweigh the risk of dividing our user and knowledge bases?

Seeing that you don't seem to be able to articulate why there would be a risk, that doesn't put much of a burden on the reward. For the current participants in Stack Overflow, there are several rewards that may be small but still nice to have. There will fewer incomprehensible posts by people who just can't make themselves understood in English but currently have nowhere else to go. There will be a place where answers from non-English-speaking programmers can be found, when such answers are currently buried in the webforums that SO sought to replace if they exist at all on the web. For the people who cannot participate in Stack Overflow due to the language barrier, the reward is considerable: they will gain access to a questions and answers site about programming.

A glaring omission

Nowhere in your rant question do you consider the benefits for the programmers who don't speak English enough to participate on SO. They would gain the same benefits that you and I gain from SO. That is a considerable gain that would outweigh a significant cost to SO — and that cost has yet to be demonstrated.

If you can have nice things, why not let others have them too?

¹ _{Plus those who don't understand that you can count to 3 even in binary.}

Answer 3

I don't think those proposals will significantly drain away users that are comfortable with the english language. I'm not a native english speaker, but I tend to visit sites in english and use english terms when searching for technical topics. In many areas there are just more and better english resources than in my native language, so using english has an advantage if your language skills are up to the task.

Stack Overflow in english will also remain by far the largest of the SO sites, through sheer inertia and the prevalence of the english language in programming. So I think that SO in english will continue to be the resource of choice for programmers that can read and write english reasonably well.

But the sites that are proposed are not primarily meant for users that speak english well. They are meant for users that struggle with english or don't speak it at all. And I don't see this as a disadvantage. Someone who is truly struggling with english will have a better experience on a site in their native language.

I'm convinced that learning english is a very important skill for a programmer, but I don't think it is our place to try and force that view onto everyone. Not that we can, we just drive those users to crappier resources in their own language.

The SE team also stated at some point (I don't remember exactly where) that they only want to create those sites for languages where users tend to avoid english resources. There won't be a dutch SO because they pretty much all speak english well enough.

I think creating duplicates of SE sites in different languages makes sense when they can reach a significant user base that does not use english sites.

Answer 4

These sites don't belong to 'us'. They belong to a commercial enterprise that is trying to create economic value. If that commercial enterprise thinks that they can create more value with sites in Portuguese or Klingon, more power to them! And to whatever extent they belong to 'us', you are not speaking for me in attempting to throw tomatoes at these proposals.

'Fragmentation' is a herring of the finest redness here. There's room in the world for knowledge replicated in many languages; just look at Wikipedia. What about experts? Well, those experts who are capable of answering in Lower Middle Frisian will answer questions there. Those that can (only) answer in English will stay put. The only possible problem is if SO.com is suddenly fresh out of SQL expertise because all of the experts have run over to the Sumerian site to answer questions in Middle Babylonian.

If they happens, the team can hire Maxwell's Daemon to shoo them back.

Answer 5

When one seeks for a piece of specialized technical information, it is typically not done by "browsing one site". It typically starts with an Internet search, and that search is conducted in a particular language. If the asker has a real choice of the language to use, they will use the language of people who are likely to know the answer. This motivation applies not just to the search, but also to creation of a new question on a Q&A site.

Lot of computer technology has been created in English-speaking countries, and large expert bases live there, but not all the technology or all the experts. I expect that the non-English sites will naturally specialize on a relatively limited, but still sustainable (for some languages) width of topics that will have some regional, linguistic or cultural dimension, doubtlessly accompanied by very basic general support to programmers who aren't good at navigating the English speaking Internet.

For me, the former is about more efficiently reaching into new information niches, and the latter is mostly about simple, beginner's questions whose reduction will be no loss to the English speaking SO.

Can a programming question even have a regional, linguistic or cultural dimension? Yes, it happens.

• Language processing technology.
• Character encodings, input methods, data exchange formats and conventions.
• Globalization and localization techniques.
• Integration to software that survives regionally and that isn't normally even spoken of in English.
• A non-English, locally popular resource makes somebody thinking and asking.
• An unexpected error message came out, oh no, localized.

Answer 6

To address the question in the title: we'll see how it goes, in practice.

"StackOverflow in Portuguese" should reach private beta soon – and I'm not talking about 6-8 weeks, the team just announced (via email, in Portuguese!) that private beta should start somewhere during the next few weeks, and public beta early next year.

---

UPDATE

Private beta started last week, https://pt.stackoverflow.com/

Answer 7

Current SO experts that are not popstars (but do contribute with quality) and are not native english speakers may feel tempted to easily become popstars in their native SO site, thus reducing or simply stopping contributions to english SO.

Answer 8

No the benefits don't outweigh the risks involved. Since StackOverflow is the only site I really use regularly this answer only pertains to that site.

Think about the huge amount of information available on StackOverflow. This took years to build up and now we'll have duplicate questions and answers popping up all over the place. As an advocate of DRY, this sounds absolutely terrible to me. You could possibly end up with the same question repeated n times throughout the network, where n is the number of languages. Awful.

For example, just take a look at the sample questions that the Portugese SO proposal says are "Top Example Questions":

• What is the difference between LEFT OUTER JOIN and RIGHT OUTER JOIN?
• What is the proper way to use the tag [abc] in HTML5?

There are, of course, already canonical answers to these questions:

• What is the difference between Left, Right, Outer and Inner Joins?
• There are nearly 7,000 questions about "HTML 5 tags"

All of the proposals have similar language. The point is that they aren't "new" questions. The entire site would be a duplicate of StackOverflow.

If those proposals go through, we'll no longer have a canonical place to find a programming question and answer. How do you know a better answer does not exist on Spanish SO? You don't.

We should keep SO English-only for now.

I know this might sound cold or unaccommodating, but the fact is that the same problem I describe above would exist for every single language-specific SO. You'd never know if you were looking at the best possible answer to your question because it could live in multiple places.

---

A crazy idea that probably won't work

How about allowing the community to translate SO into multiple languages? There could be a tab on each question where a bilingual speaker of the other language could translate the English question. The non-English version would get marked "dirty" in case of edits. If nobody has come along to translate the question and answers, then you would obviously just see the English version.

I know this is way harder than it sounds, which is why my first recommendation is to keep SO English-only. Just throwing it out there.

This wouldn't be a mass translation effort so much as an editing-like capability that's community driven.