[Wikipedia-l] This Español/Castellano split

[Brion VIBBER]

Anthere wrote:
> The fork seemed to come from a scare upon
> "english imperialism". Each time I'm on the english
> wiki, I feel somehow unconfortable. First because it's
> not easy to get when people are serious or joking,
> second because there are many points you don't get
> easily, third because you don't always succeed to
> polish your own comments as you would do in your
> language. I am sure you could understand what I mean
> here. And believe me, it's easy for a non english
> speaking to feel pushed.
> 
> As Brion (?) and others stated it, many of us don't
> understand english well enough to wander on the meta
> for example. Even after 10 years learning english.

For those of you English-speakers out there who sort of know another 
language but aren't fluent in it, I highly recommend you try to 
participate in the wiki for that language (if there is one). It will be 
a learning experience!

* All your contributions are going to be heavily edited for 
language/style corrections. Don't take it personally...

* In Talk-page discussions, you're not familiar with the existing 
conventions and "power structure" -- whose comments to take seriously, 
whose to consider, whose to ignore.

* Was that a joke?

Now, imagine that _those_ people run the server that the English wiki is 
on, and that this mailing list is in their language, and that you have 
to go to them with any problems, questions, or suggestions. You'd 
consider forking too. :)

> btw, none of us on the french wiki has any admin
> privilege. Well, we have to take the time to ask
> Jimbo. That doesnot seem essential right now, but
> that's a fact :-) But, as far as I know, we have
> freedom on all our pages. Thanksfully.

The admin privledges are sort of a mix of two things:

* Convenience features (renaming articles instead of laboriously copying 
the text and thus splitting the edit history over two entries)

* Anti-vandalism measures (ability to outright delete pages and uploaded 
files that are obscene, illegal, or inappropriate, and to ban people who 
frequently do such)

> Does it trouble you not it is a .dotcom ??? It
> troubles some of us.

The top-level domain doesn't mean much these days. "Userfriendly.org" 
and "slashdot.org" are particularly prominent .org sites that run 
advertisements and have paid subscription options... Heck, User Friendly 
is a publicly-traded company!

> I know some of us seem to consider forking later on a
> sort of natural occurrence. Others do not...

There are forks and then there are forks...

I personally would have no real objection to an _amicable_ fork, in 
which a group runs their own server but we all work together on matters 
of mutual interest: use of the name, integration/linking between 
languages, sharing updates to the software, etc.

The Spanish fork was rather unpleasant, no doubt in large part due to 
the language problem.

> As for updating the software, we will finish the
> mainpage translation this we hopefully (probably as we
> reach 1000 articles, I am very happy about that).
> After that, it all relies on others to do the update.
> Who is taking care of that ?

Well, I'm going to be pushing for getting the Esperanto wiki upgraded as 
soon as possible, so I can throw in the other languages along with it. 
:) Now that we've got the new Wikipedia server set up with more access 
for the developers, it should be easier to get this done.

(Note that there's an even newer version of the Wiki software in 
development, but we'll adapt the translations etc after we've got things 
transferred to the version we *know* works.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)