----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)bomis.com>
To: <wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2003 12:14 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Press release : Logo putschonthe
FrenchWikipedia !
If NPOV is the
same, then we shouldn't have as a goal articles which
reflect different biases.
Yes, I do agree with this, but I think that there can be differences
between article versions, even where both are NPOV.
Your split between backgrounds and interests is maybe helpful to
differentiate two kinds of adaptations that can be done to a given audience.
Take the example of [[Confucius]]. In the en: article, there are explanation
on some key words/concepts (Li, Ren, ...) that will not make so much sense
if purely translated into Chinese, I guess. Here the background differences
change the expression of the topic. So I'm not sure that both article
(en:Confucius and zh:Kongzi) could be expressed the same way, but, imo, they
should dive both to the same depth (I'm not arguing that it's always
possible to do so), because en: reader and zh: reader should be supposed to
have the same amount of interest in the topic. (Again, I may be wrong on WP
underlying goals, but I feel that "encyclopedic" POV is not only neutral,
but "universal", I mean here that any topic is interesting in this POV)