Re: release notes

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Today at 18:55, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> Yes, definitely. This is real geo-political issue with the release
> notes. For the same reason that we should avoid using flags and
> territory maps in a piece of software for the global market, we should
> avoid using controversial numbers.

As stated before, this is a number of first-language speakers.  Even
Wikipedia, which counts together all the Thai speakers gives only a
figure of 46-50 million which is far away from 65 million (of course,
it's far away from 20 as well ;).  Theppitak, is the figure of 50
million more like it (they seem to use the same Ethnologue data, yet
explain that those are pretty much the same language and thus get this
figure)?

Yes, I know people like to inflate these numbers (my friends tend to
say Serbian is spoken by 15 million, I've put in 10 million, and
Wikipedia says 11 ;), but this was just to give us a general feel of
how many people might be able to use Gnome in their native tongue.  

It was basically "at least this many people".  Never was it "this is
exactly how many people speak this language".

> That is apart from SIL numbers being inappropriate or wrong. The thing
> is that even if we could magically come by the true exact number of
> people with whatever definition we may have for them about speaking or
> reading a certain language, there will be people who will doubt about
> the number and claim that it should be lower or higher.

There are many controversial things about Gnome, this is just one of
them.  If everybody else feels the same, lets remove them.  

Though, I think we are getting ourselves lost in all the political
correctness :( 

> BTW, isn't this dialog interesting? I remember saying the same thing for
> each release since at least GNOME 2.10.

As with any even remotely controversial and/or emotional issue ;)

Cheers,
Danilo