Henry Tan-Tenn wrote:
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.
I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
fact tested even better!
- d.