Delirium wrote:
Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
What language should be used in the Encyclopedia?
The English
language used in the UK and other parts of the world differs from
that used in North America. Translating an encyclopedia into another
language is an overwhelming project. It should be done by someone who
translates it into his native language. One approach might be to
follow each paragraph in English by the paragraph translated into the
other language. This could be tried out gradually, adding more and
more of an article and then starting on a few other articles
This brings up two separate points I think: one is which dialect of a
language to use (where multiple exist), and the other is how to deal
with actually different languages.
Taking the second point first, the way we deal with this is to have
separate encyclopedias. This can be supplemented by translating from
each other (and in fact anyone who is fluent in more than one language
is greatly encouraged to do so), but may also simply be original
content provided by a native speaker of that language. Currently
these are located at
xx.wikipedia.org, where xx is a 2-letter language
code (for example,
de.wikipedia.org for the German-language
Wikipedia). Keeping all the languages in sync would ideally be nice,
but in practice is nearly impossible.
As for the first point, the English-language Wikipedia solves this by
for the most part not caring whether you use British or American
English. Articles specifically about one or the other country
generally are encouraged to use that dialect (for example, American
English for the article on [[George Washington]], and British English
for the article on [[England]]), but for most articles either is
okay. The policy is generally to let the author of the article use
whichever they wish, and then to keep subsequent additions in the same
dialect. Some effort is also made to avoid particularly provincial
idiom and slang; thus most Americanisms that would only be understood
by an American are avoided if possible, as are the Gaelic-influenced
idioms of Hiberno-English and anything particular to Australian
idiom. As not everyone realizes what's provincial, this is generally
enforced by someone from a different region saying on the talk page "I
have no idea what this sentence means," after which it is usually
rephrased in a more generally understood manner (or explained further
in parentheses).
I do not know how other languages with dialects handle the issue.
Perhaps someone from the French Wikipedia can comment on how that
encyclopedia handles French as spoken in France versus French as
spoken in Quebec; or someone from the Spanish Wikipedia might be able
to comment on Spanish as spoken in Spain versus Spanish as spoken in
the Americas.
From what I've seen (admittedly little) the differences are similar to
the differences between American and British English; a better example
would be the difference between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, as
many Brazilian Portuguese speakers can't understand European Portuguese.
It takes too
long to read a long Encyclopedia entry while connected
to the Internet so there should be a way to copy it so that it can be
read later.
It seems like a great idea to record the encyclopedia on a CD but by
the time we can make a copy (an hour) it would be out of date. When a
prominent person dies his article needs to be changed, when a
government changes or a building is destroyed the encyclopedia needs
to be updated.
This is a difficult problem. If the people in question have access to
computers, but not access to the internet, a CD is really the only
option I can think of. An alternate option for a computer that has
intermittent internet access would be to set up a system of
incremental updates, whereby the contents of the Wikipedia are
downloading for local viewing, and periodically updated by
re-downloading the articles changed since the last update. For
computers on a slow connection, the local archive might be
jump-started by an initial CD version, so only updates need to be
downloaded from the internet. Such a system has not yet been
developed, to my knowledge, partly because it's unknown how much of a
demand there might be for it (and partly simply because nobody's
written it).
You could do this User Mode Linux's COW FS, or FreeBSD's overlay FS (?)
- i.e. using support which is in the operating system, though if the
table is one file it's probably not feasible. Could be worth looking
into though.
If it's a small number of articles, a solution is
always to print them
out for reading at a later time, or copying the text to a file on a
computer hard drive.