Referring to demographic survey of Wikipedians
Would this be a study of only the English Wikipedia or also others? Maybe it is also interesting to find out of there are real differences between the Wikipedias besides the language. [[wikipedia:nl:gebruiker:walter]]
I see no reason why such a survey should be restricted to any one language wikipedia, other than the practical issue of translation. And I don't think it would be too hard to get collaborative translation projects going of the master survey version, on a wikipedia-by-wikipedia basis.
By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs. "wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest and the most visited).
Good observation. I've been using Wikipedia and Wikipedias. The reasoning for this is because Wikipedia is a brand, rather than a concept (that is, the name is more similar to "Yahoo" than it is to "weblog").
One problem with using lower case "wikipedia" is that people tend to think of it as a generic concept, such that we have seen folks erroneously use the term "wikipedia" or "Wikipedia." For an example, see:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-May/000213.html
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 23:58:21 -0400, Chitu Okoli cokoli@jmsb.concordia.ca wrote:
By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs. "wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest and the most visited).
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Chitu Okoli wrote:
By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest and the most visited).
Wikipedia is a multilingual project which comprises *all* Wikipedias. If you speak of "the" Wikipedia, you are including all language subprojects.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Wikipedia is a multilingual project which comprises *all* Wikipedias. If you speak of "the" Wikipedia, you are including all language subprojects.
As long as you don't call it (cough cough :) The W.
And it's definitely not WikiPedia, either.
Chitu Okoli wrote:
By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs. "wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
That's generally only the case with generic names like "website", not with brand names. For example, the Coca Cola company makes many products which one would collectively refer to as "lots of different types of Cokes", not as "lots of different types of cokes".
For what it's worth, I don't think it's necessary to capitalize single-instance things either if they're fairly common and not proper names. I certainly rarely see "Web" capitalized these days, and doing so looks a little bit mid-1990s (sort of like hyphenating "e-mail").
(But this is mostly a matter of opinion and taste, really, regardless of what the style-guide-du-jour tries to claim is "correct".)
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Chitu Okoli wrote:
By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs. "wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
That's generally only the case with generic names like "website", not with brand names. For example, the Coca Cola company makes many products which one would collectively refer to as "lots of different types of Cokes", not as "lots of different types of cokes".
For what it's worth, I don't think it's necessary to capitalize single-instance things either if they're fairly common and not proper names. I certainly rarely see "Web" capitalized these days, and doing so looks a little bit mid-1990s (sort of like hyphenating "e-mail").
(But this is mostly a matter of opinion and taste, really, regardless of what the style-guide-du-jour tries to claim is "correct".)
The piece of history that is innocently missing from Chitu's comments is that we have had hot edit wars over capitalization. Some might argue that "Cokes" should always be capitalized when it refers to drinks so that the uncapitalized version could continue to refer to coal. Some of the most heated arguments have been over whether all species names in English should be capitalized.
Ec
Hi,
Le Saturday 31 July 2004 05:58, Chitu Okoli a écrit :
Referring to demographic survey of Wikipedians
Would this be a study of only the English Wikipedia or also others? Maybe it is also interesting to find out of there are real differences between the Wikipedias besides the language. [[wikipedia:nl:gebruiker:walter]]
I see no reason why such a survey should be restricted to any one language wikipedia, other than the practical issue of translation. And I don't think it would be too hard to get collaborative translation projects going of the master survey version, on a wikipedia-by-wikipedia basis.
I am following this and I think that your study could be very useful to Wikipedia. And I would like to help with the French version.
Regards, Yann
Chitu Okoli wrote:
By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest and the most visited).
Wikipedia with a big W is the concept and the entirety of our project. Not the english wikipedia only (note the small w).
2 years ago, it made sense to talk of the mother (the english) and the daughters (the other ones). But since some of the other ones are quite big now (as a reminder, de is now 100 00 pages) and have their own very well established rules, customs and community, I think that speaking of the big mother with a big W as being the reference of the concept, with the other ones being just sprouts is likely to be increasingly wrongly perceived.
Just a sociological comment :-)
Anthere wrote:
Chitu Okoli wrote:
By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest and the most visited).
Oh and... www.wikipedia.org pointing at en.wikipedia.org is a historical artifact. An oddity :-) Certainly because it was the first one. The correct adress was initially www.wikipedia.com. There have been many discussions to change that... have a portal page, or an automatic redirection...but...
Other newer projects are not necessarily so, and the www. adress may point to a portal page bringing to all languages
Anthere wrote:
Chitu Okoli wrote:
By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest and the most visited).
2 years ago, it made sense to talk of the mother (the english) and the daughters (the other ones). But since some of the other ones are quite big now (as a reminder, de is now 100 00 pages) and have their own very well established rules, customs and community, I think that speaking of the big mother with a big W as being the reference of the concept, with the other ones being just sprouts is likely to be increasingly wrongly perceived.
Just a sociological comment :-)
As any parent can tell, having children grow up gives us a strange mixture of relief and regret. :-)
Ec
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