Language fallback to Spanish (es)
And in the Spanish version there may also be translation errors which the original English version will not have Xabier Armendaritz
This is FUD, but I understand that posture, since there were years ago many errors, indeed. But I (and several others) have been working hard to correct those during the last years.
I suspect (not being a Spaniard) that there are political reasons for not wanting to change the fallback to Spanish, similar to the recent change in Belarusian-language wikis by which the fallback to Russian was removed. I would personally favor not doing any changes in this regard.
"similar to the recent change in Belarusian-language wikis by which the fallback to Russian was removed" That's Ukranian, not Belarusian, see phab:T39314
10% of Basque don't speak spanish but 100% of them studied english as a second language. Besides, I prefere to have as a reference the source language much more than another translated one. Therefore, I thing that matching a small language with his dominant language (spanish/french), it's not a good idea for the development of the small one. -Sator (talk) 23:23, 1 January 2017 (UTC)
Last V sociolinguistic survey page 15.
Thanks, that's useful. You mean the 14,7 % for "Elebidun hartzaileak"? What does the term mean?
Now what makes you think that the people knowing English are more than 85 %?
Even if those numbers where made up numbers (I don't mean they are). I think is more likely for a Basque/French speaking user to be fluent in English than in Spanish, so I agree that Spanish should not be the fallback language.
I'm sorry but it's extremely unlikely that more than 85 % of the inhabitants knows English. The average for Spain is 24 % and for France 39 %.
This is not about inhabitants, but about users. And basque language users don't use Wikimedia projects because they don't know spanish/french, but because they want to use it in Basque. So if something is not in Basque language they will [politically, socially, technically] understand having it in English better than reading it in Spanish/French. If they wanted to have sentences in Spanish they would read in Spanish in first order, as most of them know the language.