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I am attending an on-line education program in my country. The Mathematics platform looks like the ideal place to make knowledge exchange and for this reason I am interested in knowing if it is allowed to participate in other languages, most of my companions are not English fluent speakers.
If I invite some colleagues.

Questions

a: Can we post questions in Spanish?

b: Can I invite my professors for helping the community answering in spanish too?

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    $\begingroup$ Relevant threads: 1617 and 7124. $\endgroup$
    – Lord_Farin
    Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 20:07
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    $\begingroup$ The analogous discussion for StackOverflow: Non-English Question Policy, and the meta discussion. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 20:12
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    $\begingroup$ I like Potato's suggestion: tagging questions written in Spanish with (spanish). Bilingual users could follow that tag to provide translation, while users not interested in the tag could ignore it. I see no potential problems, as long we have at least one Spanish-speaking moderator to sort out any issues arising from such posts. $\endgroup$
    – user
    Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 20:38
  • $\begingroup$ I think tags are a good strategy —if I am aloud to say—, and a better strategy than a site for every language, because this last strategy tends to split the math knowledge, —I assume— several people are multilingual. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 21:08
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    $\begingroup$ If there end up being a lot of non-English questions, it might be nice for SE to implement a languages preference in each user's profile so that people only need to view questions tagged as a language they can understand. $\endgroup$
    – robjohn Mod
    Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 21:31
  • $\begingroup$ That, and having translate capabilities. Also in addition to tags would be interesting to have some "group" tools. Meaning, preferences for selecting people and their posts over other contents. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 21:53
  • $\begingroup$ looked it up, lenguaje = language. Oh, in Spanish. $\endgroup$
    – Will Jagy
    Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 23:42
  • $\begingroup$ @WillJagy ¡jaja!... I mean... haha! $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 24, 2013 at 0:25
  • $\begingroup$ See the new FAQ: What is Math SE's policy on posts in languages other than English? $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 18, 2023 at 14:09

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Allowing different languages on the site would cause several problems.

SE sites are fundamentally not set up to handle such divisions into different subsites. Tags are a poor substitute, and don't work all that well to filter out languages. Tag would be a very bad solution especially to new users who would not know how to use them to filter out specific languages, misusing the tag feature this way would be very confusing.

The experience for new users on the site would be that they see questions in different languages, but no obvious way to only show english questions. This would leave a very bad impression to new users.

But the bigger issue is that it would create a dangerous bottleneck in moderation. As only a subset of the users and moderators speak spanish, far fewer users would be capable of moderating content in spanish. You really need most of the moderators to be able to act on all content on the site due to differences in the moderators timezones and vacations. Together with the inability for moderators to filter the flag queue for different languages this would make moderation in general more cumbersome, and there is no guarantee that the foreign language content could be moderated effectively.

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