On 6/6/06, Elisabeth Bauer elian@djini.de wrote:
Anthony DiPierro schrieb:
Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes against the intention (this in the context of which languages should have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well). We don't have a British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both understand each other well enough to communicate. If it were *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language while keeping the content the same, we'd do so. It just isn't, at least not with current technology.
Yes, the original plan was to write all articles in Esperanto and then have them autotranslated to all the other languages of the world. But somehow, this didn't work out so well.
The rest of your posting is sort of new to me (I wasn't aware that cultural distinctions between different language Wikipedias were to be regarded as accidental and against the intention of Wikipedia proper)
--elian
Take a look at the thread from July 2005 entitled "Policy clarification: separate Wikipedias for cultures, peoples, and countries, or for languages?"
Anthony