[venomsnake]

That could backfire badly (disclaimer - English is my second language, so I suppose I don't have some superiority complex). Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit. English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse. Right now a small investment of learning technical English (you need probably 1000 words and rudimentary grammar to be able to search and even contribute) could pay off a lot.

If we are to share knowledge we must speak a common language. A much better use of resources would have been intensive English for IT learning program that could bring people to speed.

And the high quality content found on the Brazilian SO will have hard time finding its way to the main site.

[jerf]

I can accept English as a professional requirement [1], but it's actually pretty easy to get into programming as a non-"professional programmer", and we're often pushing that programming should be extended out to school children or other groups that we can't also count on pouring years into an English-as-second-language education. I'd like such people to be able to find materials in their own language if possible, lest the bar get raised too high for basically no good reason.

[1]: Cards on table, I am effectively monolingual (can read simple French, can arguably read English far enough back in time that's it's not really the same language anymore, but that's not practically useful for programming), but IMHO that's mostly because I just have no options here for being immersed in another language, or I'd pick one up. I've taken a stab a couple of times at learning other languages but with zero (natural) opportunity to speak it to anybody else it's been an uphill battle to convince my brain it's worth doing; it keeps optimizing away the second language and, abstractly, it's correct, and that's hard to argue with....

[jaydles]

Fragmenting has always been a concern, but eventually, we realized that there are LOTS of good developers who are much less likely to participate (type) on a site in a language other than their primary one.

(Japan is a great example of a place where there are very few devs who even want to consume programming information in English, let alone exchange it that way.)

As a native English speaker, I imagine myself at a professional meetup or cocktail party where everyone else is speaking French (which I studied in college). How many jokes would I tell? How many would I even understand?. The point is, I can function, and understand all the words, but I can't really feel like a fully-integrated part of the group, and the whole thing is hard work. Can I get mission critical information? Yeah. Do I want to hang out there and try to help others? No - even though I may have mastered the topic, the language gap makes me feel less excited and less qualified than I would in an all-english group.

[bnegreve]

> Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit.

What about Wikipedia? I think they are benefiting from being multi-language.

> English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse.

All programmers are certainly not fluent in english. Reading code/documentation is one thing, having a discussion / asking a question is different.

Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask questions on english speaking forums like SO.

[venomsnake]

I prefer the English wikipedia to my native one. Also wikipedia is not SO. A good answer in English helps the whole world. A perfect in Portuguese helps only Brazil and Portugal. There should be harmonizing effort that at least takes the cream of pt.* and moves it to the main site. And I think there is a fundamental problem with SO and the way they manage the content generated - the current model is not working well for me lately.

[bnegreve]

> I prefer the English wikipedia to my native one.

Yes, but obviously, you can read English. Most people can't.

> A good answer in English helps the whole [programming] world.

There is only about 1/10th of the population that speak English as first or second language[1]. I am sure that there are plenty of people that could use a good Q/A website where they can ask questions in their mother tong.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...

[reubenmorais]

> Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask questions on english speaking forums like SO.

On the flip side, people are feeling too confident about asking questions on pt.stackoverflow.com, lowering the SNR quite a bit. But I don't know how English SO was at the beginning, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also took them a while to establish the current quality standards.

[ufo]

The more restrictive rules came as the community grew and matured. The early days of SO were very different from now. You can see this everytime someone links to a popular old question here on HN: there is always a comment complaining that the question is closed as non constructive and that So isn't as good as it used to be :)

[icebraining]

The English SO was a special place, since many of the users came from Joel's and Jeff's blogs, instead of Google, so I don't think they can be compared directly.

[jacalata]

(disclaimer - English is my second language, so I suppose I don't have some superiority complex).

but you could have a kind of hazing reaction - people tend to believe that if they have done something and it was hard/unpleasant then it must have been worth doing and other people should have to do it as well.

[walshemj]

Yes fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) English is the defacto language for IT/Engineering - just as pre ww2 for some fields German was a mandatory language and before that all natural philosophers of course used Latin.

[icebraining]

English is not, anything is better than having a knowledge and discussion spread over an hodge-podge of languages. And I say this has a non-native English speaker.

[jacalata]

You think English is not the defacto language? Why not?

[icebraining]

Sorry, I meant "English or not" :|