[WikiEN-l] Babel template en-5

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 02/05/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> Speaking only for myself, I often try to talk to people from all the
>> different language editions of wikipedia.  I like to know what level of
>> English a person feels comfortable with so that I can try to accomodate
>> them as much as possible if necessary.  I enjoy taking the time to
>> review things that I have written, asking myself whether I have used an
>> obscure word when a common word would suffice, etc.
> 
> Now that's a good point - WP's other than en. So perhaps someday a
> French speaker will realise he can chat to me in French on en, rather
> than in English. Probably a more likely scenario with less common
> languages though.
> 

It's actually considered rude on hold conversations in one language on a
project written in another, simply for the reason that most other users
of that project won't be able to read what's being said. IIRC there was
some fuss about vote-stacking in other languages...

> I have to say, editing a Wikipedia where you don't speak the language
> at all is a pretty interesting experience - and not quite as pointless
> as it sounds. When you a good free image, it's probably worthwhile
> adding it to several different wikipedias, but it can be a real
> challenge for the following reasons:
> * the interface is totally in the foreign language (could this be a
> user setting?)

Yes. See [[Special:Preferences]]. I've got accounts (and have edited on)
 the French, German, Italian and Polish Wikipedias (doing image
replacement mostly), even though I have no understanding of Italian or
Polish, and can barely remember a few words of French and German from
school.

> * it's hard to know what to put as an edit summary - do you just leave
> it in English?

Babelfish? :)

> * different WPs seem to have different conventions on Wikitext markup.
> For example, French WP seems to put category and stub tags up the top,
> rather than at the bottom.

Different social customs as well.

> * no single login ;)
> 

They're working on it ;-)

> It would be good if the barriers to English speakers contributing to
> non-English Wikipedias could be reduced somewhat. Or even if some
> mechanisms whereby in one hit you could alert all the talk pages of
> all the interwiki articles that link to/from this article that there
> is some juicy new image/chunk of text/piece of news that they might
> want to add.
> 

Learning other languages would be a good start. I find it extremely
distasteful that native English speakers (especially certain people from
a country which shall not be named) expect that everyone speaks their
language, and worse, their particular version of it.

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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