I had actually intended to send that email to Gerard privately and guess where it ended? In fact am glad it ended here because now I have received more advice than I would have received from Gerard alone.
Mark, I do get you, and you'll have noticed that I actually said that with time I hope most relevant articles will have been translated into chiTumbuka but that takes time and in the meantime it's a way of helping the reader get more information, albeit in English. The current 'depth' of the articles in chiTumbuka is such that a reader with limited knowledge of English should find the article detailed enough for information purposes but at the same time give those that understand English an opportunity to learn more about the items mentioned in the article. This is what I have seen in English articles - the articles themselves are complete, cross-linking just helps you get more information on an item mentioned in that article.
At the moment only my husband and I have contributed articles and we are both in full-time employment and that puts a limit to what we can do but I am selling the idea to friends and I am optimistic that in time we should have a 'semi-self sufficient' wikipedia. Normally you don't get that much participation on most e-fora this time of the year as people are too busy getting ready for the holidays.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com To: "Stephen Forrest" stephen.forrest@gmail.com; wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2004 2:24 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia email
What I wonder here is this, what is the motivation for linking to English articles for every single internal link?
Wikipedia practice - on all existing Wikipedias - is to link to the local version of an article, even if it doesn't exist yet.
The reason for this is that somebody who clicks on the link will be invited to write an article, rather than be forwarded to an English article.
Right now, I think an outsider would go "this Wikipedia isn't in chiTumbuka, it is almost completely in English", rather, the intention is to make it obvious that those pages don't exist and invite people to create them which is currently not what happens.
Mark