Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.
I don't know of any real case where there is a genuine strong tension between these two things, either. That is to say, the central core of the community, the people who are really doing the work, are virtually all quite passionate on this point: that we're creating something of extremely high quality, not just goofing around with a game of online community with no purpose.
The community does not come before our task, the community is organized *around* our task. The difference is simply that decisions ought to always be made not on the grounds of social expediency or popular majority, but in light of the requirements of the job we have set for ourselves.
I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any way. If anything, we are *extremely* elitist but anti-credentialist. That is, we seek thoughtful intelligent people willing to do the very hard work of getting it right, and we don't accept anything less than that. PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
There may be some cases of PhDs who think that no one should edit their expert articles, but there are many many more cases of completely unqualified people who think the same thing. It doesn't matter: if someone can't work in a friendly helpful way in a social context, that's a problem for them and for us, and we'll always have to make some very complex judgments about what to do about it.
I'm 100% committed to a goal of "Britannica or better" quality for Wikipedia, and all of our social rules should revolve around that. Openness is indispensible for us, but it is our *radical* means to our radical *ends*.
--Jimbo
I get everything you say, but would like a little bit of clarification on one point.
"in their own language" - does this mean "a language that they can, to a certain degree, comprehend" or "the language they learned natively as a child before all others" (or rather than that, at least "that language which in their mind comes before all others" - there can be various problems with native language retention given certain circumstances)?
For example, does creating a Hopi Wikipedia (assuming that we had already found committed people to build it) when there are only just over 40 monolingual speakers DIRECTLY further the goal of the project, or is it a sideline to it since the vast majority of the speakers of this language are nearly equally served by an English Wikipedia? (although, at least in Arizona, English fluency in Native American communities is often exaggerated and when somebody "speaks English", at least if they're old, it often means that they know a few words as opposed to none at all)
I think that everybody needs to be clear on this. I haven't seen resentment from you for minority language Wikipedias, in fact I have seen a great deal of support, but from some (Sheng Jiong most recently from some things he said) I have gotten the clear message that they believe we should only have Wikipedias in LWCs (languages of wider communication - french, spanish, japanese, afrikaans, dutch, croatian as opposed to breton, guarani, ainu, venda, limburgish, zulu). Please note that I am NOT referring to everybody who disagrees with me - there are many who do not show this viewpoint but still believe that more criteria should be required for new Wikipedias.
If this is not part of our main goal as a project, or if it is, I believe we (or at least I) could use some clarification.
Mark
On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 11:16:21 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.
I don't know of any real case where there is a genuine strong tension between these two things, either. That is to say, the central core of the community, the people who are really doing the work, are virtually all quite passionate on this point: that we're creating something of extremely high quality, not just goofing around with a game of online community with no purpose.
The community does not come before our task, the community is organized *around* our task. The difference is simply that decisions ought to always be made not on the grounds of social expediency or popular majority, but in light of the requirements of the job we have set for ourselves.
I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any way. If anything, we are *extremely* elitist but anti-credentialist. That is, we seek thoughtful intelligent people willing to do the very hard work of getting it right, and we don't accept anything less than that. PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
There may be some cases of PhDs who think that no one should edit their expert articles, but there are many many more cases of completely unqualified people who think the same thing. It doesn't matter: if someone can't work in a friendly helpful way in a social context, that's a problem for them and for us, and we'll always have to make some very complex judgments about what to do about it.
I'm 100% committed to a goal of "Britannica or better" quality for Wikipedia, and all of our social rules should revolve around that. Openness is indispensible for us, but it is our *radical* means to our radical *ends*.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Mark Williamson wrote:
For example, does creating a Hopi Wikipedia (assuming that we had already found committed people to build it) when there are only just over 40 monolingual speakers DIRECTLY further the goal of the project, or is it a sideline to it since the vast majority of the speakers of this language are nearly equally served by an English Wikipedia? (although, at least in Arizona, English fluency in Native American communities is often exaggerated and when somebody "speaks English", at least if they're old, it often means that they know a few words as opposed to none at all)
I obviously speak only for myself here, not Jimbo, but IMO promoting minority languages is separate from the main goal. The goal of creating an *encyclopedia* is to get information to people, in a language-neutral way. The only importance of any language in that context is that the encyclopedia needs to be available in enough languages so that everyone, or at least as many people as possible, can access information in a language they feel comfortable using---only creating an English encyclopedia, for example, would leave out in the cold people who don't understand English well enough to make good use of it.
For languages where there are few to no people for whom it's the preferred language (like, say, Latin), creating an encyclopedia in that language doesn't really get information to people that they couldn't get otherwise. Indeed, I'm not sure anybody at all would look first for information in a Latin encyclopedia rather than their native language.
That doesn't mean I oppose those encyclopedias, because all things considered, the cost of hosting them is minimal, so if people want to work on a Latin encyclopedia, there's not much reason to tell them they can't. (I might draw the line at conlangs other than Esperanto.) But I don't think they really fit into the goal of spreading *information*.
Producing a Hopi encyclopedia would still be interesting, even if there are few to no Hopi speakers who can't get their information in some other language, so I see no reason not to do so, and quite a few reasons why it might be good to do it. But it's sort of a separate goal---it doesn't fulfill the goal of getting information to people that they couldn't otherwise access.
-Mark
Mark Williamson wrote:
"in their own language" - does this mean "a language that they can, to a certain degree, comprehend" or "the language they learned natively as a child before all others" (or rather than that, at least "that language which in their mind comes before all others" - there can be various problems with native language retention given certain circumstances)?
I would say something closer to the latter. If *really* pressed to be specific, what I would say is that we would like to have Wikipedia available in _at least_ enough languages that 99.99% of the people who can read, can read wikipedia comfortably.
For example, does creating a Hopi Wikipedia (assuming that we had already found committed people to build it) when there are only just over 40 monolingual speakers DIRECTLY further the goal of the project, or is it a sideline to it since the vast majority of the speakers of this language are nearly equally served by an English Wikipedia?
I would say that it is a sideline. But if we found enough committed people to build it, I see no problem with it in this case. There are some technical/social constraints here that we have to deal with of course, so I'm not suggesting that if you go find 3 native speakers of Hopi we should (or should not) launch a wiki for them.
We can distinguish between our _central_ purpose for multi-lingual work (which is to bring an encyclopedia to everyone in the world) and the _secondary_ purpose of cultural/language preservation. The second is something I also support, but it is secondary.
I think that everybody needs to be clear on this. I haven't seen resentment from you for minority language Wikipedias, in fact I have seen a great deal of support, but from some (Sheng Jiong most recently from some things he said) I have gotten the clear message that they believe we should only have Wikipedias in LWCs (languages of wider communication - french, spanish, japanese, afrikaans, dutch, croatian as opposed to breton, guarani, ainu, venda, limburgish, zulu). Please note that I am NOT referring to everybody who disagrees with me - there are many who do not show this viewpoint but still believe that more criteria should be required for new Wikipedias.
Yes. I think a lot of difficulty has been caused by high emotions surrounding a type of case which is significantly different from Hopi. Dialects are much more difficult to decide about, as are cases where the written language is the same but the spoken language different.
In cases such as these, it is very hard to know where to draw the lines.
--Jimbo
On Wed, March 9, 2005 10:21 am, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales said:
Yes. I think a lot of difficulty has been caused by high emotions surrounding a type of case which is significantly different from Hopi. Dialects are much more difficult to decide about, as are cases where the written language is the same but the spoken language different.
In cases such as these, it is very hard to know where to draw the lines.
I must comment on this in case people may misunderstand the current state of discussion about Chinese regional varieties.
On Mon, February 21, 2005 1:13 am, Sheng Jiong said:
The current Chinese Wikipedia is purely written in Baihuawen, which is largely based on Mandarin.
Baihuawen is unversially understood by all literate Chinese, regardless of the dialects they speak.
Although written Cantonese is used, especially in informal writings, it is still uncommon for people to use Cantonese as a formal writing (eg. newspaper articles/books/academic works)
Although there is always dispute whether Cantonese is a language or a dialect, at least after some discussions, everyone agrees that written Cantonese is distinct from Baihuawen (standard written Chinese largely based on Mandarin). So this is not the case of same written language, different spoken language.
My experience with Wikipedia had been generally good before I got involved in the Cantonese Wikipedia request. It was extremely frustrating to debate when someone appealled to his contributions to Wikipedia, and some other people seemed to acknowledge that previous contribution is important and that because some unwelcomed people support a project, it will be rejected by the community. Someone determined to ignore the facts, no matter how hard I tried to present the case.
While I set up the test site in good faith to test support and to test a valid concern that written Cantonese could be too similar to Baihuawen, the response of the opposition was simply frustrating. Someone kept on complaining on the rate of growth, ignoring the fact that there are some significant contributions despite the lack of advertisement. Someone said that because most of the article titles were the same, the two writing systems are the same, and the difference was only a matter of writing style.
Fortunately, that issue has not been extended to a full scale POV war on the Wikipedia articles in any version. Interested people may still read related articles to get a fuller picture. I can only hope that such a POV war will never happen, just to prevent the Cantonese Wikipedia from being created.
I am very disappointed.
Can someone tell me what is the proper way to have this issue discussed by more people? What is the proper procedure to open a project page in Meta? Should I just open a page and hope that it will survive VfD?
Long time Wikimedians, do not know how frustrating it is for new comers to know how we should do things? We were encourage to be bold, but not told of the real community taboos, not warned that we must respond to messages, or someone may put us on RfC, say that we are incooperative and ban us forever. I spent a lot of time to help one user out of that.
Can the community be more friendly to new comers who may not understand the tricks and have not contributed much yet?
Felix Wan
Felix Wan a écrit:
I am very disappointed.
Can someone tell me what is the proper way to have this issue discussed by more people? What is the proper procedure to open a project page in Meta? Should I just open a page and hope that it will survive VfD?
Long time Wikimedians, do not know how frustrating it is for new comers to know how we should do things? We were encourage to be bold, but not told of the real community taboos, not warned that we must respond to messages, or someone may put us on RfC, say that we are incooperative and ban us forever. I spent a lot of time to help one user out of that.
Can the community be more friendly to new comers who may not understand the tricks and have not contributed much yet?
Felix Wan
I can only be sympathetic to your point of view Felix. I have the feeling as well that the wikipedia is less opened than it was before. Some do not open their arms as they would have opened them 2 years ago. There is a resistance much stronger than before. It does not help either that the community is so much bigger, as there is no way that one can keep informed about everything. I think it is much more difficult to keep a common goal all together.
Example : There were no discussions about whether to start a new language or not before. I am reading all the current discussions with interest, and wonder if I should really try to go about african languages. For a single reason, some african languages are not spoken by a lot, or some african languages are spoken by a lot, but very little written, as many people just do not know how to write.
Last comments indicated that making the encyclopedia in many languages was not our goal, but only making the encyclopedia that most people could read. If such was our goal, I think it would be enough to focus on english only, and not care for the few people who do not manage for english (making a rough point here). I am absolutely not supportive of this point of vew. I present the project as one trying to propose information in a language people understand well. The best being the mother language. To my opinion, this is also part of our goal. To make information available as much as possible in people mother language.
Where does it meet your problem ?
Well, because the bigger we become, the more people insist on quality. What was acceptable before, is not acceptable anymore today. When you could work on a 2 000 stubby french wikipedia before, now a 2 000 stubby african language will be questionned. There is resistance to new projects languages, not because it is more bureaucratic, but a lot because people feel they have more to protect. A sort of image of quality carried by the bigger languages, which does not appreciate the stubs in lesser developped languages.
I do not know what to recommand for you to do. You meet the resistance of the new stubby language, you meet the fear of "possible doubts on language duplication", you meet the resistance born from Node insistance. Add the stronger and stronger resistance of a community trying to protect what has already been done. Not easy. I hope there is more friendlyness in the future.
Hi, I'd like to take part in this discussion, but I am just overloaded with work and some minor projects for the Italian wiktionary etc.
I am writing between the lines.
Long time Wikimedians, do not know how frustrating it is for new comers to know how we should do things? We were encourage to be bold, but not told of the real community taboos, not warned that we must respond to messages, or someone may put us on RfC, say that we are incooperative and ban us forever. I spent a lot of time to help one user out of that.
Can the community be more friendly to new comers who may not understand the tricks and have not contributed much yet?
When I first found wikipedia and wiktionary as a place where I could contribute I noted that I was not made for wikipedia - I like to read, but not to write encyclopedic articles.
Wiktionary then was "my home" - on one hand as it allows me to do as much as I can - one edit can be done in a minute - and if there's plenty of time you can indeed do much more.
Lately I discovered other projects that interest me (the proverbs, wikijunior, recipes) - so it is not said that wikipedia is the best place to contribute for a newby - sometimes it would be easier to start contributing anywhere else, and then step by step walk into "wikipedia" wich is more difficult to approach (at least for me).
So yes, encouraging is great, but we should also try to understand the person, the hobbies and maybe address them to projects they could really be fond of and where they can give the best. This is even more difficult then just explaining the how to's, but it brings more to all of us.
Friendlyness: sometimes it is very hard to comunicate with people you don't know and friendlyness can be very subjective - it even depends where the person you talk to comes from. And often people are just to impatient. Anyway: new contributors instead of being rudely stopped in what they are doing (this happens) should be contacted directly and one should say: "Thank you for contributing - it is great to have you here with us - see: after so many time of wikipedia/wiktionary we set up certain rules as the more people are contributing the more rules are needed. Your article is interesting, but does not meet these rules - so I'd like to explain you step by step how to create ..... - and then really explain step by step using mails including also descriptive text you already prepared before.
We should try to write how to's that are not only published on wikipedia/wiktionary etc. I noted that people read things on other portals as well. This could help a lot - often people just don't find where things are written or they don't read every single line. People are lazy (we all are in some way) - how often do you really read a instruction manual for a fridge or somthing else you buy? And how often do you read things that are not as important, but that come from mailing lists?
Examples: I have a small portal for translators that has not many visits a day - approx 30 - 50 from anywhere in the world. In a forum about wikimedia (manly wiktionary) projects I posted some topics in Italian only - and people read this: - How to add a translation to an existing words: 64 reads - Is it possible to download wiktionary contents: 101 reads - How to register on wiktionary: 73 reads
Example : There were no discussions about whether to start a new language or not before. I am reading all the current discussions with interest, and wonder if I should really try to go about african languages. For a single reason, some african languages are not spoken by a lot, or some african languages are spoken by a lot, but very little written, as many people just do not know how to write.
This is the case for many minor languages that need to be protected.
Last comments indicated that making the encyclopedia in many languages was not our goal, but only making the encyclopedia that most people could read. If such was our goal, I think it would be enough to focus on english only, and not care for the few people who do not manage for english (making a rough point here). I am absolutely not supportive of this point of vew. I present the project as one trying to propose information in a language people understand well. The best being the mother language. To my opinion, this is also part of our goal. To make information available as much as possible in people mother language.
Indeed this should be one of the main goals, as maybe even more people would learn to read ... and hopefully also to write.
Where does it meet your problem ?
Well, because the bigger we become, the more people insist on quality. What was acceptable before, is not acceptable anymore today. When you could work on a 2 000 stubby french wikipedia before, now a 2 000 stubby african language will be questionned. There is resistance to new projects languages, not because it is more bureaucratic, but a lot because people feel they have more to protect. A sort of image of quality carried by the bigger languages, which does not appreciate the stubs in lesser developped languages.
Indeed - but: every wikipedia is seen as an own project, every wikipedia develops in another way - so these minor languages must be created to give them the chance to survive. Not giving this chance means to estinguish not only the language, but also the culture of the people. Diversity is important and understanding it is even more important. So when a new wikipedia in a minor language is started I would suggest to use a special introduction text - not just the one used for the "big languages", but to add that this wikipedia not only has the aim to create encyclopedic content, but also to enable a culture to survive, a language to survive and that contents for sure are going to develop not too fast and that people are needed to contribute to make as perfect articles as possible.
These Wikipedias should be more seen as a project to protect these languages that in a second stage develop as perfect encyclopedias. For sure they will take more time, but if it is there and people are working on it: instead of making the perfectionists we should be proud about the fact that it is indeed possible to create this very particular Wikipedia (and maybe wiktionary as well in a second stage).
At this point I'd like to repeat one thing: if someone needs wordlists out of txt doc etc. files to be created: I have a software that does this easily. So I can help you with this.
I do not know what to recommand for you to do. You meet the resistance of the new stubby language, you meet the fear of "possible doubts on language duplication", you meet the resistance born from Node insistance. Add the stronger and stronger resistance of a community trying to protect what has already been done. Not easy. I hope there is more friendlyness in the future.
Again: please see the creatin of a wikipedia in a specific minor language from all points of view - not only from the perfectionist one.
Ciao - and we finally have fine weather on the Amalfi Coast :-)
Sabine
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
The community does not come before our task, the community is organized *around* our task. The difference is simply that decisions ought to always be made not on the grounds of social expediency or popular majority, but in light of the requirements of the job we have set for ourselves.
Similarly, the sister projects too are organized around their own tasks, though even there they maintain a more distant relationship to the idea of an encyclopedia.
I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any way. If anything, we are *extremely* elitist but anti-credentialist. That is, we seek thoughtful intelligent people willing to do the very hard work of getting it right, and we don't accept anything less than that. PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
I think that where Larry Sanger missed the point is in confounding the experts with their expertise. Many of the more stable editors among us deeply appreciate expertise, while being highly intolerant of experts who expect their status to give them a free ride. The editors from academia who lasted understand that, and have learned to live with it. They understand that the dues that they paid elsewhere are not recognized as dues here.
I'm 100% committed to a goal of "Britannica or better" quality for Wikipedia, and all of our social rules should revolve around that. Openness is indispensible for us, but it is our *radical* means to our radical *ends*.
You're too modest. Why not simply say, "Better than Britannica"?
Ec
On Mar 9, 2005, at 8:09 AM, Evan Prodromou wrote:
On Tue, 2005-08-03 at 11:16 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
I hope you mean "retaining" and not "retraining" here, Jimbo. B-)
~Evan
Both Wikipedia is different from academic writing. The point of an academic paper is to drive to a point, the purpose of a wiki article is to describe the points made in notable and documentable sources.
Stirling Newberry wrote:
On Mar 9, 2005, at 8:09 AM, Evan Prodromou wrote:
On Tue, 2005-08-03 at 11:16 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
I hope you mean "retaining" and not "retraining" here, Jimbo. B-)
~Evan
Both Wikipedia is different from academic writing. The point of an academic paper is to drive to a point, the purpose of a wiki article is to describe the points made in notable and documentable sources.
good point
I'm pretty sure Jimbo meant "retaining", but that doesn't make "retraining" any less accurate (and amusing) in that context.
Evan Prodromou wrote:
On Tue, 2005-08-03 at 11:16 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
I hope you mean "retaining" and not "retraining" here, Jimbo. B-)
*laugh* This is one of the best typos I have ever seen. The beauty of it is that it appears to subtly undermine my entire position.
"Sure, we respect academics, at least enough to retrain them..."
No, I meant 'retain'. Sorry about that. :-)
--Jimbo
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