Steve Bennett wrote:
On 02/05/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Speaking only for myself, I often try to talk to people from all the different language editions of wikipedia. I like to know what level of English a person feels comfortable with so that I can try to accomodate them as much as possible if necessary. I enjoy taking the time to review things that I have written, asking myself whether I have used an obscure word when a common word would suffice, etc.
Now that's a good point - WP's other than en. So perhaps someday a French speaker will realise he can chat to me in French on en, rather than in English. Probably a more likely scenario with less common languages though.
It's actually considered rude on hold conversations in one language on a project written in another, simply for the reason that most other users of that project won't be able to read what's being said. IIRC there was some fuss about vote-stacking in other languages...
I have to say, editing a Wikipedia where you don't speak the language at all is a pretty interesting experience - and not quite as pointless as it sounds. When you a good free image, it's probably worthwhile adding it to several different wikipedias, but it can be a real challenge for the following reasons:
- the interface is totally in the foreign language (could this be a
user setting?)
Yes. See [[Special:Preferences]]. I've got accounts (and have edited on) the French, German, Italian and Polish Wikipedias (doing image replacement mostly), even though I have no understanding of Italian or Polish, and can barely remember a few words of French and German from school.
- it's hard to know what to put as an edit summary - do you just leave
it in English?
Babelfish? :)
- different WPs seem to have different conventions on Wikitext markup.
For example, French WP seems to put category and stub tags up the top, rather than at the bottom.
Different social customs as well.
- no single login ;)
They're working on it ;-)
It would be good if the barriers to English speakers contributing to non-English Wikipedias could be reduced somewhat. Or even if some mechanisms whereby in one hit you could alert all the talk pages of all the interwiki articles that link to/from this article that there is some juicy new image/chunk of text/piece of news that they might want to add.
Learning other languages would be a good start. I find it extremely distasteful that native English speakers (especially certain people from a country which shall not be named) expect that everyone speaks their language, and worse, their particular version of it.