[Wikipedia-l] Re: multilingualism (was Q1 drive)

[Stirling Newberry]

>>
>
> Just now I listened Jimbo's interview by the NPR journalist Brian 
> Lehrer
> , who did mention that Wikipedia had some 160+ languages.  But not
> surprisingly this was hardly a central aspect of the story.  I think 
> one reason is that the English edition has garnered the most attention 
> due to its age, size and activity, and the criticism specifically 
> directed at it by the Encyclopedia Britannica and others.  Another is 
> the assumption that should en: fail (or be judged to have failed), one 
> can safely assume smaller and less active editions will also fail.  So 
> the discourse ends up circling around en: as a test case, almost to 
> the exclusion of other innovative aspects of Wikipedia.  This is 
> unfortunate but probably unavoidable given the limited understanding 
> and experience the public has about how wiki works.  But I do agree 
> that "multilingualism" should be cited more often as a central 
> characteristics of Wikipedia, in the sense that Wikipedia is not 
> merely one edition replicated hundreds of times (though I imagine it 
> may feel that way to our developers), but rather the whole is more 
> than the individual languages put together.  That might sound a bit of 
> a cliche, but I think there's something there worth developing.
>

We should go further, that there are signs of "poly-linguism", where 
the different languages are acting to support each other, where 
articles written in one language are being used as material or a basis 
for others. This will, again, serve to underline the advantages of 
wikipedia as a project. I know I have used German wikipedia articles at 
various times, and it might even be worth collecting some anecdotes 
about how wikipedia is forming a "research community" that is larger 
than any single language.