Huh? Could you please provide some evidence for this striking claim that the French and German Wikipedias are failing? Let me be clear: I don't think anybody reads the English wikibooks either! CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. _________________________________________________________________ BigSnapSearch.com - 24 prizes a day, every day - Search Now! http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/117442309/direct/01/

No it doesn't. The greatest tool for the education of those poor sods in the 3rd world is the English Wikipedia, plus Spanish, French, etc. But mostly en. Here's why. 1. It's the biggest. It's the best. You learn the most. 2. You get to practice reading English at the same time. English is THE global language and will become even more so, mostly because of the economic dominance of the US and the fact that it's so easy to learn. You can learn to speak understandable English in a month: even if/when China takes over economically, we'll still do business in English. I know hundreds of people who can speak English as a second language: I know not one non-Chinese who speaks fluent Mandarin. Mr Botswana will do far better economically from en than he will from botswanian wiki. 3. It is not run by monomaniacal ethnic zealots, who find smaller wikis laughably easy to take over. Even ru wiki has a problem with this, I've heard. On en, people like me spend hours making sure that history is not distorted by fanatics and that our narratives offer an accurate, rational fair picture. There's little food for fundamentalists. God knows what crap you find on smaller wikis with less editorial oversight. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Bombay, this seems particularly relevant. Conclusion: let them all fail, bar the big ones. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. _________________________________________________________________ See the most popular videos on the web http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/115454061/direct/01/

Right, you act as if smaller wikis were tremendous vessels of potential just waiting to be filled with pearls of wisdom, when experience suggests they are landfill sites. If Google develop something that could automatically translate every article on en into perfect Mongolian/Latvian/Zulu, your comment would make perfect sense. As it is it makes none. And I suggest you google my sig. The irony is impressive. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. _________________________________________________________________ Win £1000 John Lewis shopping sprees with BigSnapSearch.com http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/117442309/direct/01/

Christiano Moreschi hett schreven: Well, from a totalitarian point of view, that would be the best. A totalitarian system gives precendence to what is supposed to be the best for the society in its entirety (or its dominant faction...). A sytem that applies the principle of 'freedom' lets the people decide what's best for them. Let's make a reality check: I live in Germany. In German public schools English is in the curriculum for all pupils. You can't graduate from school (even the most basic degree) without being confronted with English for several years. I don't know since when. At least since the 1930s. Perhaps even earlier. So almost every German had English lessons at some point in his life. But de facto opinion research instutes gain results of about 50 to 60 % when they make representative polls in Germany about whether people speak English. So roundabout 50 % of all Germans do not speak English. And we should keep in mind, that "speaking a foreign language" in many peoples minds is connected to "holidays" etc. Many of those people who state, that they speak English, could ask for directions in English-speaking places or they are able to buy groceries at Wal-Mart or something basic like that. But that doesn't mean, they would be able to understand encyclopedic content in English. Numbers are hard to estimate. Perhaps 20 % of all Germans can read and understand encyclopedic material in English? And even less are able to _write_ encyclopedic content in English. I'm quite sure this number will be clearly less than 10 % for Germany. Germany is a fully industrialized country with a well functioning education system. I guess numbers will be notedly lower in many other areas of the world. At least 80 % of the human population on earth does not understand English. Let's think about it: What's easier? To teach billions of people English or to create good encyclopedias in many languages? I cannot estimate the effort it needs to teach all people English. At least in Germany 70 years of teaching wasn't enough to make the Germans fluent in English. And the Romans and later the French and Spanish are trying to assimilate the Basque since 2000 years and Basque is still around and vivid. So I can say: It needs _much_effort to make one language known to all people. The effort necessary to create a reasonsable encyclopedia is easier to estimate. English Wikipedia met the milestone of 100,000 articles in February 2003. According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_frequency> there were 107 persons with at least 100 edits in the month of February 2003. 100 edits a month is a rough measure of "users dedicated to the project", I guess. That means 107 dedicated contributors were able to create a 100,000 entry encyclopedia in two years (actually it were even less users most of the time). That should be feasible for smaller languages too. If there is good and efficient public outreach it should even be doable for languages with less than 100,000 speakers, to create a 100,000 entry encyclopedia in two years. In western societies about one percent of the total population is teachers. The number of retired teachers will range somewhere between 0.5 to 0.3 compared to the number of active teachers. So there are 3 to 5 retired teachers per 1000 inhabitants. So in a population of 20,000 there will be around 100 retired teachers. If we could reach all those retired teachers and convince them to do something for Wikipedia in their free time (of which there is much for retired people) it should be possible to create a 100,000 entry encyclopedia in two years. Including other retired academics, non-academics, non-retired people, students etc. it should be possible for languages with even fewer speakers. Of course only with very good outreach... And off course from a totalitarian point of view it's still a waste of time. But from a cultural positive point of view it's feasible. Marcus Buck

Hoi, I wish for 80% of our projects to have the same problems as our bigger projects. It would be cool that we could compare the quality issues of the Xhosa Wikipedia or any of the bottom 80%. It takes content in order to talk about quality. The content is not there and consequently quality is not an issue. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Yaroslav M. Blanter &lt;putevod(a)mccme.ru&gt;

I don't see why it matters. As long as there's /some/ content, there's content that can be poor quality. If anything, a wiki with virtually no community is more susceptible to quality problems. If someone intentionally inserts misinformation or libel into an article on the English Wikipedia, it will likely be reverted in minutes, if not seconds. If someone does that on a small wiki with no active users, how long is it going to take to be removed? It might not show up in the top of Google search results, but its still a quality problem. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi, EMC2 is a company who sells storage solutions to big companies. I was at a presentation of their documentation manager. He informed his audience that the people who buy their products invariably state that they prefer the English documentation. They always get the translations as well. The benefit to EMC2 is that they sell more products. The translation of their documentation adds pennies to the pound in costs, costs that are easily offset by the increased sales. The point is that people understand things better when they are addressed in their own language EVEN when they can read the language that is foreign to them. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt;

Sorry, but to me this just sounds like FUD. Do you have any information to back up your claims about small wikis deteriorating? Don't forget, these are WIKIS we are talking about. In WIKIS everyone can change the content, and even though people may add bad content, they may also add good content (and believe it or not, there is functionality that makes people able to remove bad edits!). You're applying the problems of the large wikis to the smaller ones, which is not really appropriate, because they are on completely different levels. Sure, the smaller wikis have problems as well, but they are very different from the problems enwiki and dewiki are having. 2008/12/1 Christiano Moreschi &lt;moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk&gt; -- Jon Harald Søby http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by

2008/12/1 Milos Rancic &lt;millosh(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Serbian isn't a launguage. It's a dialect of the Central South Slavic diasystem and one of the projects I had in mind when I brought up smaller languages becoming POV forks. You also need to considered the argument beyond wikipedia. The ratio of scientific papers published in english compared to any eastern European language (except to an extent Russian) is very considerable. This is not something wikipedia can do anything about. Even if such languages do get more extensive beyond a certain point they will be relying on English references. -- geni

Hoi, Interesting but off topic. At issue is that many parts exist that are known to make MediaWiki more usable. We need to make MediaWiki more usable and all it takes is to apply the lessons learned by applying the results of the usability studies performed by UNICEF. We only have to learn about their findings and apply them to our projects. What is needed is for us to consider what it would take to make this happen on our projects. It does include several opportunities; the templates for new articles allow us to promote structure on articles, the functionality itself promotes participation. I do argue that our projects will benefit tremendously from this low hanging fruit. I would like to see the lessons learned by UNICEF as soon as possible because it will give our MediaWiki software a new lease on life. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Milos Rancic &lt;millosh(a)gmail.com&gt;

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 7:27 AM, Nikola Smolenski &lt;smolensk(a)eunet.yu&gt; wrote: :) Nikola, diasystem is by lexical formation a system of dialects. BTW, to follow Yaroslav: article [[diasystem]] at en.wp is laughable ;)

The point is that the quality of the vast majority of scientific-related articles even in English Wikipedia is laughable anyway. This is a much more general problem that the language division. Cheers Yaroslav

Hoi, Given that UNICEF has done proper usability studies. Given that they have measured the success of the changes they made. We can be aware of the lessons that were learned in this way. We can adopt the changes and learn how it affects *our *smaller projects. When we cooperate with UNICEF, when we apply the lessons learned we can expect to do better. When 80% are considered to be a failure, when we identify a major reason why, when we apply the lessons learned and these projects still fail, it is not because of something that we could have done. I am raising awareness of the issues we know we have with usability. I am involved in getting these extensions tested so that people can safely adopt them. I urge the WMF to allow projects to have the benefit of improved usability. When projects choose to improve usability, we will get metrics on how this makes a difference. We may learn what approaches work in which cultures and not in others. It would be so cool if we could discuss these things because we have this experience. Thanks, GerardM 2008/11/30 Mohamed Magdy &lt;mohamed.m.k(a)gmail.com&gt;

Hoi, Another way to approach the number would be; currently 80% of our projects are failing. Improved usability may mean that this number goes down to 60% maybe even 40%. This would be a big improvement. I am not in favour of creating 100% success by excluding others until it is necessary and until out options to improve their chances of success. Given the aims of the WMF, projects that are currently failing are still projects where the WMF intends to do well. As the costs of the failing projects is negligible there is no real reason to remove them. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/2 Lars Aronsson &lt;lars(a)aronsson.se&gt;

Lars, have you read my message today in the other thread? I argue that dividing stuff by projects is not a good metric to determine what is successful and what is not. Cheers Yaroslav

Hoi, I am sure that you and I have learned to create new articles. In the usability study, people who were completely new to MediaWiki were asked to perform well described tasks. All testsubjects were unable to create new articles. They did nothing wrong, they just could not figure out how to do this. These tests were recorded on video and analysed by usability experts. Consequently the results are relevant and provide the best explanation that I have had so far why so many of our projects are failing. The good news is that the issue that has been identified is one that we can remedy. The even better news is that the UNICEF developers have created extensions that have been proven to make a difference. We only have to understand their results and apply the knowledge gained. Obviously we will want to ensure that this software complies with our standards, but this is something that we have the expertise for. This is a clear win-win situation as UNICEF stands to gain their functionality adopted by the WMF and consequently have less of a maintenance issue. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Amir E. Aharoni &lt;amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com&gt;

2008/12/1 Fajro &lt;faigos(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: No. You can argue for the tolerance of minority languages but actively promoting them conflicts with Wikimedia's stated objectives. -- geni

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:08 PM, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: How? Do you edit wikipedia to give "Free Access To All Human Knowledge" only to the educated elite? -- △ ℱajro △ IM: fajro(a)jabber.org Lernu! - http://www.lernu.net Wikimedia Argentina - http://www.wikimedia.org.ar

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:19 PM, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: WTF??? Some people really need read more about cultural diversity and linguistic rights -- △ ℱajro △ IM: fajro(a)jabber.org Lernu! - http://www.lernu.net Wikimedia Argentina - http://www.wikimedia.org.ar

2008/12/1 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: A curious statement, wich I strongly disagree. Promoting the development of minority languages means to promote new skills in the people who talks this languages, to help them to build online content in this languages, to put knowledge closer to this people, etc. etc, and all this means to "empower and engage people around the world". Patricio -- Patricio Lorente Mensajería Instantánea: patricio_lorente(a)jabber.org Blog: http://www.patriciolorente.com.ar

2008/12/1 Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia-inc.com&gt;om>: It doesn't seem that anyone does...

Jimbo: Thank you for your comments. As a person who manages a small wiki project and two language forks from it, I found some of the comments very disturbing... almost frightening that such exist. Your comments re-affirm my confidence in the Wikimedia Foundation and its purpose. Thanks. Mike On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:24 PM, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia-inc.com&gt; wrote:

2008/12/1 Finn Rindahl &lt;finnrindwiki(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: I think you mean "echo" - to repeat what he said.

@Pedro :Yep, it's a two way interaction that I believe benefits all projects (sort of human interwiki) @Thomas:Echo would be the English word, thanks. "Ecco" however is also correct eEnglish, ref. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_non-eEnglish_spelling_and_grammar_c…. (Note to self: Irony should be avvoided in online communication, especially when writing foreignly) @Gerard: Yes, there will be a lot of loud voices, but in the end we'll manage to work out this as an improvement to help new (and perhaps older) users as well. There was A LOT of load voices at Commons when (what I still hope is) a more userfriendly uploadsystem was launched, but it seems to be working just fine ;) We may get more nonsense articles going straight to speedy deletion, but the way to raise the quality of wikip/media is certainly not to avvoid maiking it easier for people to edit, Finn R 2008/12/1 Pedro Sanchez &lt;pdsanchez(a)gmail.com&gt;

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia-inc.com&gt; wrote: Don't forget Esperanto. On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Michael Finney &lt;finney.md(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Some of those comments was openly promoting ethnocide and linguistic discrimination and aparently nobody noticed it. I knew that wikimedia was a little anglocentric, but this is too much. -- △ ℱajro △ IM: fajro(a)jabber.org Lernu! - http://www.lernu.net Wikimedia Argentina - http://www.wikimedia.org.ar

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Fajro &lt;faigos(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Promoting minority languages certainly does not conflict with Wikimedia's stated objectives. But it is *not* one of Wikimedia's stated objectives. Wikimedia provides a platform where minority languages can develop; it's the people who can write these languages that do the actual development work. On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 6:19 PM, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: "Getting empowered" is not equal to "learning English". -- Amir Elisha Aharoni heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

GerardM - what steps need to be taken to begin testing and adapting the UNICEF usability extensions? Where would be a good project to begin - perhaps the Simple English Wikipedia, if that community is amenable? That its in English might make development easier, and a more usable interface might fit with the philosophy of the Simple wiki. Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm curious to know what data changed your mind. Moreschi - What you advocate is basically cultural imperialism, which is a recipe for conflict and disruption - not education. Making knowledge available to as many people as possible is the goal; if those people don't speak English, they should not be excluded. As others have noted, it is much easier and much more in line with our goal to find contributors who can build suitable references in all languages. To your point that these references are likely to have poor quality anyway - I'm not sure that makes sense logically. A small community does not necessarily equal poor quality content; I imagine that the size of the community correlates with the volume of content, and while there are less people to police quality issues there is less content to police. Nathan

Hoi, The software has been tested but not all extensions are considered ready for WMF production. I am establishing contacts with, among others, people at UNICEF to make sure that we identify the outstanding issues carefully and fix them efficiently. Given that the CreatePage extension requires changes to the skin, it may make sense to consider using a superset of monobook (I do not know how feasible this is). Given that the software is already being localised at Betawiki, we do not need to restrict ourselves to English. I understand that UNICEF uses some of their software in Swahili :) I would love to consider Swahili for this ... Kennisnet is interested in this functionality, that would make Dutch an option. It needs to be clear that it is not only Wikipedia projects that will benefit. The benefits from a more useable interface have little to do with a "simple" approach. Newbies are not able to contribute. Our need for more contributors and content is most dire in our smallest projects. Personally I am not that interested in using "simple" as a test environment. From my perspective, it should be there for all the projects that want it. Obviously, when this extension is localised first, it will be more effective. When we are to test this in a Wikimedia Wiki, we need to get involvement from Brion. It would help a lot when the WMF actively takes part in this collaboration and make usability a priority. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Nathan &lt;nawrich(a)gmail.com&gt;

Hoi, When usability improvements are to be implemented, it will change the dynamics of a project. It is easy to argue why the smaller projects need more content and more contributors. It is also easy to argue the same for the bigger and biggest projects. When a skin becomes available with a BIG button saying "Create new article", there will be loud voices explaining why it is a bad idea. Arguments that make sense up to a point. It is important to start thinking in terms of: when it becomes easier to contribute to a MediaWiki project, what are the implications. I am of the opinion that this will be on balance beneficial. But that is just me. I have not been addressing the board. I am grateful if the board takes an interest but I would prefer it when the WMF organisation takes up the baton. At most and at best the board can give usability more of a priority, but I would not be surprised if the organisation is ready to give usability more priority without Board involvement. The timing would not be that bad as the new developers are getting experienced and I expect that most of the work associated with the fund raiser is done. If you are a developer, I would LOVE you to have a look at the code. I would love to see proposals for a skin that does include a "CreatePage" button. I would love you to fix the bugs that have been identified by MinuteElectron. I am sure that there is enough that you can do to make usability an issue that we are now starting to address. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Nathan &lt;nawrich(a)gmail.com&gt;

Hoi, There is no point in usability studies when the lessons learned are not applied. At the Boston Wikimania there was another person who had done studies on usability and MediaWiki. She even presented about it at the "Hacker days"... Given the current opportunity, we should make the most of it. We should improve our usability and learn from the existing usability studies. They are far more relevant to us then most of the other studies performed on us. These studies help us to do better, to be more inclusive, to grow our projects. As to Commons, it is effectively useless to the people that do not speak English. There is a proof of concept solution to this. In my opinion, it does not make sense to ask people to upload to Commons if the images are lost once loaded because for them there is no way to find these pictures again. So while the wizard may help load the pictures and provide license info, they do not solve the more important problem. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt;

Hoi, The Dutch Wikipedia has passed 500.000 articles.. if a seven year old Dutch kid would be looking for a "paard", the child would not get what we have in store when it asks for a "horse" in stead.. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=paard&go=Try+ex… http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Horse I know of smaller WMF projects where even the admins have given up on Commons.. So yes, Commons is a great project but it has only 3,5 million media files and it does not support other languages like it could and in my opinion should. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt;

Hoi, Yes they do. Why would there otherwise be a search box ? Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt;

Hoi, When you are to build a system that connects Wikipedia / Wiktionary etc articles to Commons, you are building a system that relies on the articles to exist in the languages you want to get the data from. So it is restricted to the data that you have in the projects. To build this data, I would use the software developed by Daniel Kintzler for his master thesis and expand it for the languages Daniel does not yet support. This approach will work for Wikipedias. What you get is the type of data that can be included in a system that is based on the OmegaWiki notions and that will need a database that is quite similar to OmegaWiki. With an OmegaWiki implementation, we can include information from languages we do not support within the WMF. Consequently we can provide infromation that is not provided by any of the projects. So, yes you can. However there is more that you can do. As you may know, in OmegaWiki we demonstrated how to connect to both Commons and Wikipedias. The big advantage it provides that there is no need for connecting to Commons from each Wikipedia article. You only connect from the concept both to Commons and the various Wikipedias. Yes, OmegaWiki is Open Source and its data is Open Content. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt;

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Could you please elaborate on the individual extensions, as to what they do? There are already ways to have inputboxes to create new articles, and to have templates preloaded in to them (the former can be seen on the homepage of the hu.wikinews; the latter I've seen in action on some Wikiproject pages). If it is really only a question of starting an article, maybe instead of working on a new extension we could merely put these kind of inputboxes on the homepages of the new/smaller projects (or teach the community how to do it, and let them decide). I have to confess, though, that I am a bit sceptical about this: Hungarian Wikipedia has no prominent "create article" link on its homepage and there are new articles every day from new users, while Wikiquote has one, and there no more than a dozen new articles in a whole month. Best regards, Bence Damokos

Milos Rancic wrote: At the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago, many of the 100+ participants were librarians or teachers in social sciences, and a smaller number were into natural sciences and technology. All presentations were in Swedish and on the first day's workshops we used the Swedish Wikipedia as our playground. On the second day, one of the presentations was made by an astronomer, Dainis Dravins, who talked about his experience from letting undergraduate college students do their project presentations either as posters or as Wikipedia articles. This picture is from his lecture, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LA2_Wikipedia_Academy_2008_lecture_… Only after a while did it become apparent that he was talking of the English Wikipedia. Some surprised librarian asked "are you now talking of the English Wikipedia?" His answer was something like "yes, the Swedish is almost completely useless" (for advanced astronomy). In the undergraduate astronomy classes he was teaching, all literature is in English. This seemed like an unknown planet to the Swedish librarians. And I guess that their surprise came as an equal surprise to the astronomer. I think one of the greatest values of Wikipedia Academy is when the attendees get to see each other's reactions to Wikipedia. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

2008/12/3 Yaroslav M. Blanter &lt;putevod(a)mccme.ru&gt;ru>: en:wp is very much an international Wikipedia, not just for English native speakers at all. This leads to some difficulties (apparently infinite supplies of nationalist POV-pushers in some conflicts, for example), but is almost certainly good for NPOV. This is no reason to neglect the other Wikipedias - English just happens to be the current lingua franca and may not be in 100 years. - d.

On 12/2/08, Milos Rancic &lt;millosh(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Milos I would say your English fluency is good enough to write one, please do. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grgur_Branković&action=edit&a… The less obvious benefit of supporting "failing projects" is that most of them will eventually return the favor by identifying topics which are encyclopedic despite being completely unknown to native English speakers. This alone is a good enough reason to keep these projects open. Same with the other article you mentioned, would it be anything like this? :-) http://sr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Конаčни_судбина_Свемира&actio… —C.W.

Fajro wrote: It seems to me that this would differ greatly depending on the minority language. Some minority languages, despite being "minority", have millions of monolingual speakers. Clearly if these people are going to get Wikipedia's information without learning a new language, we need a good Wikipedia in that language, because otherwise the information is not available in a language they can understand. But other minority languages have few to no monolingual speakers; some barely have any native speakers at all. The presence or absence of a Wikipedia in those language is more of an issue of language politics and language preservation than actual dissemination of an encyclopedia's contents. -Mark

Anyone who doubts about the deplorable state of, well, many language editions of Wikipedia, may have a look at this: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gleeder&oldid=25822 Gleeder Measurements: WMF might: - reconsider the rules for allowing new language editions, with regard to the non fictional literature produced by the linguistic community and the linguistic proficiency of those who ask for the new edition (and don't let them be by too few) - be more strict that editions stick to Wikipedia rules, like those about the encyclopedic character of Wikipedia - give small Wikipedias more advice, like in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Manual_for_small_and_new_Wikipedias - consider to install a kind of mentor or tutor for these small Wikipedias Ziko van Dijk 2008/12/1 Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde