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.
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?) * it's hard to know what to put as an edit summary - do you just leave it in English? * 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. * no single login ;)
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.
Steve