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Comment by lazerwalker

13 years ago

I find it fascinating that for a repository of German law, written in German, the README and commit history are all in English. I wonder if that will have the effect of scaring off any would-be contributors.

the readme has a german section right above the english one.

  • Ah, right you are! Didn't notice it thanks to the anchor link.

    Doesn't change the commit history's melange of English and German.

    • All Germans I have ever met have had excellent English. Certainly good enough to read short English commits with only the occasional dictionary reference required.

      The Eurobarometer report from 2006 says 56% of Germans speak English.

      But I suspect that rather underestimates the case here. There is a huge difference between someone checking a box on a form that says they can speak English and being able to parse short messages in English.

      And given only fairly educated, tech-savvy Germans are likely to participate in this, I think the negative effect from English commits is straight up zero, or at worst incredibly low.

      Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-sp...

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I second that.

I'd like my government to do the same! Don't really care about the versioning system, as long as it's open-source and alive.

  • Actually, it is not "the government" doing this. It is somebody scraping an official web site containing every law, processing it and pushing the result to this repository.