Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 6/7/06, Delirium delirium@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:
The similarities are just as accidental as the differences.
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?
I reject the syllogism that absence of accidentality implies intention. The English Wikipedia is as neutral as the converged thoughts of its participants, but so are all the others.
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]].
I think that the native Esperanto speakers would have a hard time keeping up. :-) I have no background on this "original plan", though I suspect that the idea would flatter the esperantists.
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.
Your hypothetical premise here is unrealistic
Ec