EU backs up European Civilisation

Considering that Italian (and its close derivatives) is probably the most widely spoken first language in the EU, that's crazy.

Personally, I think the EU should set an example and have a policy of supporting language groups, not individual languates. Any document should be provided in the language of the country providing it, and translated into one Romance, one Slavic and one Germanic language. And then into one "rest of them" language, which I think would just be English/French/Hungarian/Finnish. If those four can't cope with having it available in the three largest "first language" groups available, then tough ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Copyright and commercialization of academic libraries makes both these projects useless for Average Joe. No such thing as a free public internet library. In order to get past the search and actually read the material would require you to either be rich and pay hefty sum for each article or be a member of academic elite with a free-pass to a library through your university.
For the rest this is as useful as an empty can of soda. Whackypedia might suck academically but at least its available to everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union
English, German and French ARE the most spoken languages in Europe with a fair margin ahead of Italian as 4th, so it makes perfect sense to have those 3 languages.

Well... french IS a romance language!, but I agree that all EU languages should be available

Well, I speak / read English and French fluently, and can understand a bit of written German, but I definitely think they should translate it into every EU language. It's not like translators get paid a lot anyway (on the contrary).

P.s. - Worldwide (and I'm sure the encyclopedia isn't just meant to be read from within the EU), Italian and German are almost negligible. English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are the biggest european languages, worldwide, by far (North America & Oceania -> English; South America -> Portuguese and Spanish -> Africa -> English, French and Portuguese).

If a country (including France, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom...) wants his language to be part of the Europeana, it has to provide (i.e. pay for) the translation. Eventually, a country should be free to translate only those parts of the encyclopedia it considers important enough for translation . 

PS "English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are the biggest european languages, worldwide, by far ". Taking the number of internet connexions into consideration, this order could be Englisch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French.

We're launching the prototype of Europeana on November 20th with the interface in as many of the 23 offical langauges of the European Union as possible. Over the next couple of years we will be working on ways in which searches can be translated into all EU languages.

We will launch with free access to over 2 million digital objects: that includes digitised books, films, museum objects, sounds, paintings and photographs. There will be content from every country in the EU, and places like the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the British Library will be well represented. 

Over the next year we will be working with Wikipedia so that our content works with their encyclopedia entries: we have a test project ready to go ahead once we've completed the launch of the Europeana portotype.

Go to the site if you'd like to know more about the launch:
www.europeana.eu

Cheers,
Jon Purday,
Communications, Europeana.eu