On 6/7/06, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> 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.
It doesn't make any sense to me either, and it seems to directly
contradict this exchange:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Is it considered acceptable to have spearate
Wikipedias for different
cultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existing
Wikipedias considered in this capacity?
Jimbo responded:
In general, no, but there are many complications of
course relating to
ISO language codes, dialects, languages, etc.
Anthere responded:
Imho, it is not acceptable at all.
We try to reach people in their mother language or at least a language
they handle very well, but we should not provide different content based
on any other specificity such as nationality, religion, political view point
and such. By definition, since we try to stick to neutrality, the content provided
should fit all.
Angela responded:
No it isn't. I agree with what Jimmy, Anthere, and
others have already
written in reply to this.
Jimbo claims he's said this many times in the past. I couldn't find
any, but if anyone else can maybe I can better understand what he's
saying. If Jimbo does "NOT think that cultural distinctions between
difference language Wikipedias are accidental", then he must think
they're intentional. That raises the question as to who intended
these distinctions, and what distinctions were intended. I always
thought the English Wikipedia at least was supposed to be neutral with
regard to culture. Maybe English is the exception?
Jimbo also writes "Anyway, if we were going to use a constructed
meta-language, obviously it would be Klingon or Toki Pona. ;-)" This
presumably was a response to "Yes, the original plan was to write all
articles in Esperanto and then have them autotranslated to all the
other languages of the world." This might point to some of the
confusion, as my statement had NOTHING to do with constructed
languages. I was thinking more along the lines of Wikipedia after the
invention of the [[babel fish]].
If everyone in the world could write to everyone else in the world and
be understood, would there still be a need for multiple language
Wikipedias? Is Jimbo saying that yes, there would? If so, I'd LOVE
to see some of the "many times in the past" he's talked about this,
because it makes absolutely no sense.
Anthony