Mark Williamson a écrit:

Hi, I have a question to put forth.

Hi

I do not wish to have a disagreement with the members of a just recently active Wikipedia for fear of scaring them away, so it's better to discuss it here.

Thanks for doing this. I am just as embarrassed than you.

Recently, I removed the spam/advertisement-ish text from the mainpage of the Wolof Wikipedia.

It was reverted, twice, by the currently active Wolof-speaking user, Yannick Duchesne.

I feel however that it violates policy.

A rough translation: «ANAFA (National Association for Literacy and Adult Education), an organisation in Dakar, Senegal is now working on the translation of open-source software like SPIP (http://www.spip.net) (a speedy Internet publisher to manage magazine-sites).

Cooperating with the Canadian organization "Alternatives (http://www.alternatives.ca)", we plan very soon to edit the Wolof (http://wo.wikipedia.com), Pulaar (http://ff.wikipedia.com) and Mandinke Wikipedias and work with every NGO in Africa to promote African languages on the net.

This is within the category of a rebellion against linguistic discrimination and inequality (particularly bad online) and for the equality, solidarity, and diversity of cultures.

ANAFA and Alternatives ask academians - especially Africans - to upload here their original copyleft documentation in Wolof and any other African language.

More equality and freedom will come from it!»

I have emphasised that the mainpage is supposed to be an introduction to Wikipedia. I even tried removing the POV parts and moving it to a separate article at [[ANAFA]], but apparently this was not enough.

I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, or what is appropriate - is it OK to have such text on the mainpage at all?

Also, Yannick claims to have read Wikipedia documentation extensively and so there is supposedly no issue with his understanding of NPOV.

Mark

Yannick intends to have some people work in wolof in the next few days, and requested adminship on meta, as most editors of new small wiki projects do.

I first went to the wo to check, and had the feeling Yannick was not entirely updated on our principles, so I talked to him by mail and thought we could give him a chance.

Yesterday, I went back to wo, and saw the comments left by Mark, and appreciated them. I thought it would probably be enough, and I further suggested that he comes over to the french wikipedia to "get the feeling".

I made him sysop for 3 weeks, in order to allow translation of interface. I limited it to 3 weeks, as I was a bit worried by his lack of understanding of our policies.

I may have made a mistake here...:-(

I reverted to your changes node, and unprotected the main page. I also let a message asking again that no ads for ANAFA is on the main page, and that the main page remains unprotected.

Mark, I trust you to maintain the NPOV principle. Could I rely on you to see what is going on over there in the coming days ? As well as to try to explain whatever is needed to explain to them ? They are all new and really are visibly not really aware of a couple of things.

Please, if you see that this really turns sour, leave a message on the steward page and ask that someone removes Yannick sysophood. I wish that this does not happen though until he had time to fix a couple of things. And PLEASE, no one make him bureaucrat. The last thing we want to do is to unsysop dozen of guys who just do not get it.

Anthere