At 10:29 AM 3/11/03 -0600, Takuya Murata wrote
Sorry. I see what I mean was not so clear. Some policities such as NPOV are inalienable. We are buliding a sole international, multilingual encyclopedia not the collection of encyclopedias in different languges.
Sure. We can also claim we don't have exactly the same goals as they were defined on the english wiki; we can claim we don't use the same means; we can claim the community doesnot function the same way. We can claim each wikipedia has a set of individual references. We may. But, still, we share common software, that requires common agreement on some points.
No, the goal should be the same, that is, building free encylopedia, which is under GFDL and edited by everyone.
I have come to see some people fear allowing more automity might undermine the coherence in the whole project of wikipedia. I totally agree with that.
What I don't like is that it seems to me non-English edition tends to replicate the English edition. Non-english editions should not be translation version of English edition. Comma is a good example that we simply applied English system to Japanese edition. And worse, the problem remains unsolved for long time. Something wrong. No?
Agreed. The interlanguage links should be a tool, not a restriction. If someone who knows Japanese is reading an article on the English wikipedia and sees a link to the Japanese one, they can follow it. But neither needs to be a translation of the other. There's no rule against translating, of course, if a contributor finds it useful, but the details may well differ, and of course the structure. Comma count is an excellent example.