On 6/20/05, Rick giantsrick13@yahoo.com wrote:
If you and I went to another language's wiki and started writing comments in only English, don't you think there would be objections?
IMO it would all depend on how and why you did it, and how you responded to comments to your extensive writing in English. The topic of this list is English Wikipedia: I write about sv:WP below because I think a comparison adds to the understanding of the complexity of the subject.
At Swedish WP there are people who do post quite a lot in English on talk pages. The reason for non-Swedish-speakers to write comments in English on Swedish Wikipedia could be many: the topic might be international Wikipedia colloaborations etc, something about the WikiMedia board elections etc (see Angelas comments previously) but also sometimes comments regarding article content etc. We have an editor from Japan who writes about international golf players at Swedish Wikipedia: I guess he mainly adds dates for tournaments, victories and similar, since he doesn't speak Swedish - I haven't checked, only seen some of the discussions. He discusses a lot on the talk pages, to be able to use the right words etc. If anything, I think people find his efforts kind of cute. The non-Swedish-speakers or poor-Swedish-speakers who edit without discussing - mainly by exchanging one word for another, or cutting parts of articles away - are IMO much more of a problem.
We should probably realise, though, that if he and three or four other guys discussed the golf articles at sv:WP in Japanese instead of English, that would be something else. I guess Swedish is not as bad as Japanese to the average English speaker, but almost (bork bork). ;-)
To add a small complication, there is a situation where I will probably always add a comment in Swedish on an en:WP talk page, after what other stuff I've written in English. This is if I am adressing a person who I know is from Finland and whose Swedish is good; so good that it might be his/her first language. Due to history and the relationship between Finnish and Swedish nations and languages, not acknowledging I am talking to a fellow Swedish speaker although from Finland is a bit... if Ifail to do this I feel like a jerk. I don't ask you to understand the mechanisms behind this, and quite possibly it is more in me than in them. I just ask you to not let general encouragement of posting in English at en:WP go so far as to frown on this kind of small comments; it might make life at English Wikipedia a bit more complicated for us than you understand.
I am still very much in favour of encouragements of taking the on topic parts of discussions in English.
/Habj