There _is_ no such thing as "the Wikipedia article on". Wikipedia/ウィキペディア/維基百科/위키백과/װיקיפּעדיע/ויקיפדיה/Wikipédia/Wikiibíídiiya/Vichipedie/ვიკიპედია/ويكيبيديا/ويکيـپـيـډيا/Viquipèdia/Oiquipèdia/Wikipidiya/ਵਿਕਿਪੀਡਿਆ/Вікіпедія/Википедия/Vicipéid/ᏫᎩᏇᏗᏯ/ꀁꇹꀸꄛꀋ/𐍅𐌹𐌺𐌹𐍀𐌰𐌹𐌳𐌴𐌹𐌰/Βικιπαίδεια/Wikipedija/Wicipǽdia/+++ is an INTERNATIONAL project to build a MULTILINGUAL encyclopedia. There should be multiple articles for each topic, and there are for a significant portion, in many different languages.
Mark
On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 03:47:19 +0100, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
I just read this blog entry from January: http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php
The author, Danah Boyd, a notable blogger and expert in social networks, criticized "the Wikipedia entry" for "social network", but she actually referenced the entry on the Simple English Wikipedia. What's worse, nobody in the comments corrected her, even though they clearly went to the English Wikipedia to look up different topics and compare.
I suspect Danah googled for the title rather than visiting Wikipedia. Picking the wrong site is an easy mistake to make, since, except for the word "Simple" in the URL and page title, articles from the two sites look exactly the same. The concept of a "Simple English" Wikipedia is also not a trivial one to grasp even if someone actually does see it in the title, so they may just ignore it and think it's some strange Internet thing. After all, many addresses have things like "www10" or even arbitrary server names in the front.
If an expert can make that mistake, I'm sure many other people have, wondering why all the Wikipedia articles they looked at were written in very juvenile prose and incomplete.
I strongly recommend that we change the look and feel of the Simple English Wikipedia to avoid that confusion, perhaps going so far to add a [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] to that effect. A somewhat different logo would also help. The changes I can make without being a sysop are limited, though, and Simple is not particularly active, so I thought I'd bring this to the attention of the list first.
Regards,
Erik
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