I’m a Spanish native speaker. Learnt English pretty much forced by the need of keeping up with knowledge development (a mechanical engineer), that is naturally lagging in Spanish compared to English.
I’m not really fan of SO in Spanish. The site has very little traffic, everything is kind of mixed and the feeling most people get is that the “experts” aren’t as expert as those in the standard SO (I gather that from the many Spanish speakers I’ve directed there to ask their R questions).
Most people end up taking the additional steps to ask their questions in English. The response time is much better and often the quality of the answers, too.
I don’t think it will be good to have questions asked in other languages, for the reason @MasonWheeler explained. However, I think we should create a kind environment where someone with a less-than-good English can ask his wonderful question. Putting to high a bar in terms of grammar and spelling could deter some of the OPs.
I’ve edited many questions in SO that were asked (rather obviously) by non-English speakers. Sometimes I can infer they are Spanish or Portuguese speakers by the kind of errors they make, so I can edit those questions and almost always deliver what the OP wanted and couldn’t say. Then my idea:
- All questions and answers should be written in English, that’s a hard rule.
- Create tags that allow the OP to identify his / her native language (if he or she feels that there are some limitations), so specific language-able editors can look at those questions and improve them (removing the tag, aftwerwards).
- Avoid the proliferation of clone sites that only differ in language.