Mark Williamson sia-kong:
When Danny or Jimbo or Eloquence or Angela or whomever presents the concept at a conference, as far as I know they either 1) don't mention languages except in passing, 2) mention that it's multilingual and that there are, for example, German and Japanese versions or 3) mention the fact that it is available in the national language.
Just now I listened Jimbo's interview by the NPR journalist Brian Lehrer , who did mention that Wikipedia had some 160+ languages. But not surprisingly this was hardly a central aspect of the story. I think one reason is that the English edition has garnered the most attention due to its age, size and activity, and the criticism specifically directed at it by the Encyclopedia Britannica and others. Another is the assumption that should en: fail (or be judged to have failed), one can safely assume smaller and less active editions will also fail. So the discourse ends up circling around en: as a test case, almost to the exclusion of other innovative aspects of Wikipedia. This is unfortunate but probably unavoidable given the limited understanding and experience the public has about how wiki works. But I do agree that "multilingualism" should be cited more often as a central characteristics of Wikipedia, in the sense that Wikipedia is not merely one edition replicated hundreds of times (though I imagine it may feel that way to our developers), but rather the whole is more than the individual languages put together. That might sound a bit of a cliche, but I think there's something there worth developing.