[Air-l] internet linguistic variety citations desired

[Nancy Baym]

> 
><http://www.glreach.com/globstats/index.php3>http://www.glreach.com/globstats/index.php3 
>has great stats on online
>  languages. They have English at about 35% of online language at this
>  point (no longer a majority, but still a plurality).
>
>  They've been tracking this info since 1995 and have summaries of the
>  growth of Non-English languages here:
> 
><http://global-reach.biz/globstats/evol.html>http://global-reach.biz/globstats/evol.html

>mmm hmm.  seen those.  we've chosen not to rely on Global Reach's
statistics or reports because they have a vested interest in providing
statistics that encourage people to... surprise... *BUY MORE STATISTICS*
from them.

>independent verification of the arguments being made by the data they
provide really is going to be necessary.

I'm all for independent verification, especially given the difficulty 
of figuring out what exactly is getting measured here, but I don't 
follow the logic that because they want to sell more statistics, 
theirs can't be trusted. Are they more likely to sell future 
statistics if they misrepresent or make errors? Are there specific 
ways in which you have reason to believe their estimates are 
innaccurate?

-- 
Nancy Baym	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org