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In the recent podcast Jeff and Joel talked about the big 5 languages and that these were the 5 languages that had a reasonable presence in IT.

The list:

Are there any suggestions on how these language sites could be better promoted in our programming community?

Am I allowed to create a unique ad for the Chinese site to be included as part of the Open Source Advertising Sidebar?

Are there other ways to promote these sites in our community beside ad placements?

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Jeff and Joel talked about the importance of the big 5 languages and that these were worthy of their own sites because there are a large number of programmers who also speak these languages.

Well, first, that's not really what they said:

(#06 47:30)
Jeff: There's only like five languages that are sort of big enough
Joel: In IT. There are 10 languages, probably, that cover a big chunk of the world's population. But in IT it's a smaller number. And the five that I was talking about are the five that I would want for programming questions, in those languages

These sites don't have anything to do with programming:

The English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is for linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts

German Language and Usage - Stack Exchange is for students having questions about German, expert speakers of German wanting to discuss the finer points of the language and translation questions from any language to German.

I got the impression he was listing the proposals that are likely to succeed because A51 proposals tend to get a lot of traffic from SO, but they're not "worthy of their own sites"

Are there any suggestions on how these language sites could be better promoted in our programming community?

I honestly don't think programmers are likely to be interested in these sites just because they happen to be the languages used by a majority of programmers; they're totally unrelated topics. In the case of German, where the focus is on learning the language, it's exactly the opposite -- it'll be people who don't know the language posting the question

Am I allowed to create a unique ad for the Chinese site to be included as part of the Open Source Advertising Sidebar?

According to the instructions:

It must be an advertisement soliciting the participation and contribution of programmers writing actual source code.

So it sounds like no

Are there other ways to promote these sites in our community beside ad placements?

There's a few discussions on meta (and probably A51 itself) about how to promote sites. One example is What do you do to promote your Area51 proposal?

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  • Sometimes we hear what we want to hear. I had another listen and I've edited my question and hopefully it takes away any spurious claims. My thinking was that the English speaking programmers on this site were likely to have on of those languages as a second language, but I think the point was that there are large numbers of programmers who speak those languages. Not quite the same thing.
    – going
    Jun 2, 2011 at 1:07
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    If enough of us has to cite portions of the podcast to clear something up we'll have a transcript in no time.
    – random
    Jun 2, 2011 at 1:10
  • I actually think that you might be able to get away with an ad on the gaming site, since stackexchange is "gameified" with the points and badges.
    – Moshe
    Jun 2, 2011 at 4:09

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