Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot imagine that we would want to do so.
This seems like a strange position to me.
My view of a good encyclopedia article is that *any* reasonable person in the world would find it: 1) informative; and 2) neutral. This should include non-native speakers of the language, people from outside the typical "culture" of the language, and even people who can't speak the language at all who have the article translated for them. On en:, we make an explicit effort to have it *not* be biased towards Anglosphere culture, but instead to pull in people who speak English as a second language (whether well or not) and are generally outside of "English-speaking culture". This isn't of course 100% successful, but the *goal* is definitely to make it a global encyclopedia, not an encyclopedia only for people who are culturally in the English-speaking world.
They are probably both right. At a deep level all the differences are accidental, but that's not a reason to be compulsive about harmonizing them. In one sense too Wikipedia can be seen as a lens that converges all knowledge at the top of the Tower of Babel, but I doubt if that approach has any practical value, except perhaps in the minds of techno-geek Vulcans who believe that there is a logical computer solution for every possible problem.. So I do believe that the differences are accidental, but I see that as a good dynamic. Viewed separately the Wikipedias in different languages are bound to arrive at different NPOVs that are each strongly rooted in distinct cultural values. A language with a small concentrated geographical territory is more likely to achieve a satisfactory NPOV, without the complicated arguments that may be encountered with a widely dispersed language like English. This broad range of neutralities helps keep things dynamic.
Ec