Inside LabourStart

I’ve begun a comprehensive review of the use of languages on LabourStart and have begun tightening things up, trying to make sure that a language that appears in one part of our system appears in the others. Over the years, it’s all become a bit of a mess, but here are some preliminary observations:

• In our news database, we allow input of news in 50 languages.
• Until recently, only 28 of those languages – the active ones – were properly tagged. From now on, all 50 languages are properly encoded.
• Only 28 languages have translated frameworks and are therefore listed on the front page.
• The five most heavily-used languages – the ones that have had 10,000 news stories or more in our database – are English, Finnish, French, Polish, and Norwegian.
• There are 25 languages that can be used for campaigns, though any code can be entered — even inaccurate ones (e.g., xx).
• As of this morning, we have mailing lists for all 50 languages. The 8 biggest, with more than 1,000 addresses each, are English, French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.