[Wikipedia-l] Red links

[Brion VIBBER]

Anthere wrote:
> My question on that list was a very factual technical one, not by *any* 
> means a request or an order for anybody to comply to. Whatever my wishes 
> or my needs, I cannot help you for my programming skills are rather 
> limited. I would be glad that other developpers from other wikis (french 
> included) help with the soft development, but for sure, my can only be a 
> wish and it happening or not is really none of my business.

It would be pretty easy and I think quite reasonable to set that and 
other things up as site-specific (and ergo language-specific) 
configuarable defaults, just as I've for instance set the default time 
zone on the German wiki to match European local time since the user 
community is overwhelmingly in the same time zone, and it was requested.

I'll try to set some more of these things up in the near future... I'm a 
little behind on various things (I promised to set up a Danish test wiki 
and haven't done it yet, sorry!)

> My wish is not to open a war between a slightly overbearing en.wiki and 
> a multitude of tiny childish wikis. But to raise the issue of whether 
> minorities are granted a voice or not, whether they are allowed 
> creativity themselves within an enlarged community or just to be 
> nurtured in the shade. And given that minorities do not rely on the same 
> channel of communications, asking how minorities voices could be heard.
 >
 > I hope you will understand it goes slightly further than a red link 
issue.

The more overlap there is between the active software developers and the 
non-English wikis, the better I think this will be. (Since by definition 
the developers are the ones implementing the changes to the software 
being discussed; everything else is just sound and fury until fingers 
touch the code.)

> This said, I think I can unfortunately consider you answered to my first 
> question "Do we consider international wikipedias to be part of the 
> actual wikipedia community ?" You said no. I feel very sorry about that. 
> But it is your privilege.

Oh, Lee's often enough equally uncaring about the users of the English 
wiki. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)