Quebec wastes money on silly campaign to promote French

Wow, this is not how you spend 1.5 million dollars to promote a language:

A new Quebec-funded ad campaign that encourages people to speak more French is getting bad reviews from some English-speaking Montrealers.

The $1.5-million "Bonjour" campaign urges Quebecers to greet each other in French.

The radio version tells listeners that "Bonjour is the best beginning" for every conversation.

First of all, the chance of people being swayed by a radio campaign to greet each other with bonjour is minimal. The other thing the campaign neglects is the fact that French is threatened by English on all sides precisely because of English's greater worldwide status: the fact that you can use it in more places and find more material in the language. So it's a problem that isn't simply limited to Montreal.

I think spending this amount of money on promoting a language is just fine, but there are better ways to spend it. So what would be a better use of $1.5 million? Well, here's one idea:

First, hire about 50 people from a range of backgrounds, reasonably intelligent people that may be university students or young people working in various fields. Their job is to write on the French Wikipedia every day, with a minimum of let's say 50 edits and 5 new pages. The details on who writes about what would be worked out in the beginning and hopefully there would be a somewhat detailed overall plan on what sort of content they'd like to see put up, but there should be a lot of freedom given there as well to write about other things.

These people are paid about $80 a day, and that means that for $1.5 million they can work for a year. After a year, the French Wikipedia now has some 91000+ extra pages that it wouldn't have had otherwise, as well as almost 1 million new edits. The French Wikipedia right now is at 715000 articles and 36 million edits, so that would be a significant contribution. It might even be able to surpass the German Wikipedia in a year depending on how active the other contributors are as well.

They of course would not be provided computers; they would use their own and just have a minimum number of edits and articles to write in a day. The subjects should not be overly political as well, since these changes are often reverted by people that don't agree. Far better would be articles about Montreal, its neighborhoods, history, famous people, all those things that governments really enjoy promoting. Who knows, perhaps all the extra info and attention will end up bringing a few more tourists to the city as well, and it would get a lot better press than the bonjour campaign.

Would that be the best way to use $1.5 million? Hard to say, but it's certainly better than a silly campaign telling people to say bonjour. The reason why a lot of people end up learning/using English is simply because there's so much more of it. The best way to fight against this is to make more content in your own language.