On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:50 AM, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote: <snip>
- The slogan "Wikipedia is a non-profit" sounds weird to me.
Technically, Wikipedia is not "'a" non-profit (which in my English as a second language view of the world, means organisations) . However, Wikipedia is non-profi, ie. the project is not meant for profit.
Maybe that doesn't work in English, I don't know. I suppose that the site notice is going to be translated, so maybe make sure that the translation makes sense rather than reflects the English text. Also, in many languages (well, at least in French) non-profit is a huge set of words. We might want to "localize" the slogans rather than just "translate them".
<snip>
It is not just you Delphine. As a native speaker "Wikipedia is a non-profit" sounds weird to me too. I know what is meant by it, obviously, but generally speaking "non-profit" as a noun does mean an organization, while Wikipedia isn't an organization; it is an encyclopedia.
"Wikimedia is a non-profit" would of course work grammatically, but Wikimedia lacks comparable name recognition.
"Wikipedia is a non-profit encyclopedia" or "Wikipedia is a non-profit project" can work with "non-profit" used as an adjective rather than a noun.
-Robert Rohde