Muhammad Yahia shipmaster@gmail.com wrote:
Where is the community? where is the involvement and exchange of ideas and continuous evolvement of articles? where's the wiki in wikipedia? - I see it as POV to assume that wiki x has the 'perfect' article on a certain subject such that everyone in the world needs to read that version only.
You raise some important points. The understanding of community-building is a key insight, and I think everyone here appreciates it. I understand that it's not enough to just "push" an article over to Swahili, for example, if 1) the translation is not sufficiently understandable on its own, if 2) the receiving language editors aren't practiced in how to handle such content, or if 3) the sender doesn't leave a note in a "lingua franca" explaining what its purpose is.
Note that the idea is not that only English language articles will "push" over to other languages - the idea is that other languages may have articles about topics which could be "pushed" over to English as well.
There has been perhaps a natural sense that there is some kind of encyclopedic imperialism inherent to the idea. There is also an assumption among many here that language is always relativistic and of cultural essence, or that English Wikipedia's 3.4 million articles are just out of the scope of relevance to other languages. I'd like to dispel those notions, but that would be out of scope for this particular email.
-SC