I get everything you say, but would like a little bit of clarification on one point.
"in their own language" - does this mean "a language that they can, to a certain degree, comprehend" or "the language they learned natively as a child before all others" (or rather than that, at least "that language which in their mind comes before all others" - there can be various problems with native language retention given certain circumstances)?
For example, does creating a Hopi Wikipedia (assuming that we had already found committed people to build it) when there are only just over 40 monolingual speakers DIRECTLY further the goal of the project, or is it a sideline to it since the vast majority of the speakers of this language are nearly equally served by an English Wikipedia? (although, at least in Arizona, English fluency in Native American communities is often exaggerated and when somebody "speaks English", at least if they're old, it often means that they know a few words as opposed to none at all)
I think that everybody needs to be clear on this. I haven't seen resentment from you for minority language Wikipedias, in fact I have seen a great deal of support, but from some (Sheng Jiong most recently from some things he said) I have gotten the clear message that they believe we should only have Wikipedias in LWCs (languages of wider communication - french, spanish, japanese, afrikaans, dutch, croatian as opposed to breton, guarani, ainu, venda, limburgish, zulu). Please note that I am NOT referring to everybody who disagrees with me - there are many who do not show this viewpoint but still believe that more criteria should be required for new Wikipedias.
If this is not part of our main goal as a project, or if it is, I believe we (or at least I) could use some clarification.
Mark
On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 11:16:21 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.
I don't know of any real case where there is a genuine strong tension between these two things, either. That is to say, the central core of the community, the people who are really doing the work, are virtually all quite passionate on this point: that we're creating something of extremely high quality, not just goofing around with a game of online community with no purpose.
The community does not come before our task, the community is organized *around* our task. The difference is simply that decisions ought to always be made not on the grounds of social expediency or popular majority, but in light of the requirements of the job we have set for ourselves.
I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any way. If anything, we are *extremely* elitist but anti-credentialist. That is, we seek thoughtful intelligent people willing to do the very hard work of getting it right, and we don't accept anything less than that. PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
There may be some cases of PhDs who think that no one should edit their expert articles, but there are many many more cases of completely unqualified people who think the same thing. It doesn't matter: if someone can't work in a friendly helpful way in a social context, that's a problem for them and for us, and we'll always have to make some very complex judgments about what to do about it.
I'm 100% committed to a goal of "Britannica or better" quality for Wikipedia, and all of our social rules should revolve around that. Openness is indispensible for us, but it is our *radical* means to our radical *ends*.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l