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(a)gmail.com>
To: "Stephen Forrest" <stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com>om>;
<wikipedia-l(a)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