Stirling Newberry wrote:

We should go further, that there are signs of "poly-linguism", where the different languages are acting to support each other, where articles written in one language are being used as material or a basis for others. This will, again, serve to underline the advantages of wikipedia as a project. I know I have used German wikipedia articles at various times, and it might even be worth collecting some anecdotes about how wikipedia is forming a "research community" that is larger than any single language.

I definitely do this as well, and I think it's one of the strengths. Although some people seem to be promoting the view that the different language editions should actually be different, and not just translations of one another, I tend to think they should be as similar as possible. One useful thing, IMO, is to look at the articles on the same subject in two languages you can understand reasonably well. If they differ, try to figure out which parts of each are better, and integrate those parts into the other one.

-Mark

Henry Tan-Tenn wrote:

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.

I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in fact tested even better!

- d.

--- David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in fact tested even better!

Correction - the German version has been systematically tested, the English version has not. So the conclusion that one is better than the other is unknown at this time.

I would certainly like to see a similar test done on the English Wikipedia.

-- mav

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On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:00:14 -0500, Henry Tan-Tenn wrote:

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.

It's not exactly the fact.

While the larger language Wikipedias compete with commercial encyclopedias (and the larger language speakers have the choice), the smaller language Wikipedias are _unique_, the speakers of such language don't have much choice -- and Wikipedia appears to be the only _try_ to create an encyclopedia. It also can become the main source for a future "official" encyclopedia, which might be too expensive for a not so large people, if all the authors are paid.

So, Wikipedia might exist as a set of _relatively good_ sources for the languages, which do not have large choice. E. g. I am not sure if there had ever appeared any Ossetic text on the Laplandian War before the "translation of the week" has been done (though there are certainly lots of texts, including large novels, on the WWII in Soviet territory).

Wikipedia for a nation of 500 thousand to, say, 5 million seems to be the best way of writing an encyclopedia in their language. And even if the English WP fails, that will not mean the idea is all wrong for every language on the Earth.

Sl.

Kaixo!

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 09:02:37PM +0300, V. Ivanov wrote:

While the larger language Wikipedias compete with commercial encyclopedias (and the larger language speakers have the choice), the smaller language Wikipedias are _unique_, the speakers of such language don't have much choice -- and Wikipedia appears to be the only _try_ to create an encyclopedia. It also can become the main source for a future "official" encyclopedia, which might be too expensive for a not so large people, if all the authors are paid.

That's so true.

Here I share my experience with Walloon wikipedia. Walloon language doesn't have any official support at all (while Wallonia has quite very great autonomy in several areas (including the ability to sovereingly sign internationa treaties), the areas of culture, edutcation and medias are outside the scope of the Walloon government, and the body in charge of them seems to do anything to hide differences that may exist between Wallonia and Brussels (and the native language is indeed such a difference); as a result you won't find anything with official backing in Walloon language. But even about the language, you can't find much (most of the existing texts (in French or German) have been written in the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries).

When I discovered Wikipedia, I wanted to have a Walloon version, mainly for the prestige increase that would give to the language; I didn't knew however if that could success or not; the number of users is still low (only three very frequent contributors, and a small handfull of occasional ones; less than 10 in total, but I hope there are more readers). However, once it started to run it had some effects I didn't expected at first. The first one, is a living example of coperative work where a common spelling is need; because as long as you write novels, poetry or even journalistic articles, which have a single author, the normalization of the spelling can be avoided; but when a single text may have (and indeed, has) many authors, a common spelling is a practical necessity. There has been also a good number of articles about Walloon language and culture and about Wallonia; yes the content is heavily tilted that way, more than I thought at the beginning (but will change with time probably), but on the other side I learned a lot of things that I ignored previously, about writters, historic personnages, places or rivers of my country, that I should have known but didn't, as there isn't any public nor private mass diffusion of that info; in fact wikipedia had come the first source of information on the internet for some of those topics, and something we are proud of. Also, the copying of articles from other wikipedias, have pushed the need for Walloon terminology about some topics that traditionally weren't spoken or written in Walloon, in particular we are growing a list of articles about mushrooms that created the need to name in a precise way the different specias; strange as it may seem, there wasn't attested names for mushrooms (only a generic name "mushroom"); a side effect of the wikipedia has been the creation of Walloon names for a lot of mushrooms (from their French or latin names). Also, the creation of articles and the hyperlinks between them have lead to the exploration of a lot of connex subjects, and the discovery of Walloon names for some plants or animals that were used only locally in some places, and the rehabilitation/revival of those names; something that we wouldn't have thought about if it weren't for the fact of putting [[ and ]] around some terms (for example, an apple everybody knows what it is, there wasn't much thinking about it before; but from the startting of the article about apples, there is a list of apples species, and then we realize there is actually a lot to learn and to say about apples, about their history, their cultivation, their use in culinary preparations, etc)

Wikipedia is indeed a very powerfull tool; in the specific case of Walloon (and probably that can be the case too for most minorized languages) it is the *best* tool existing.

Wikipedia for a nation of 500 thousand to, say, 5 million seems to be the best way of writing an encyclopedia in their language. And even if the English WP fails, that will not mean the idea is all wrong for every language on the Earth.

Even if English fails (because of unsustainable traffic, that seems the greates problem for en:) other wikipedias, and particularly small ones, can still continue to exist; the Walloon wikipedia ran on my own server for the first months of it existance, and if the wikimedia hosting should collapse some day for whatever reason (something I hope will never happen) I will move it to somewhere else, but it wouldn't die; it is a too valuous thing for us.