Delirium wrote: Languages are not culture ?? Encyclopedias most certainly are !! Please consider what words are used in a culture. The English used reflects the culture the person speaking or writing comes from. The idea that you can divorse culture from language is odd. When comparing articles on the same topic the diffferences are sometimes huge. When we have an encyclopedia with articles that are acceptable to all people who speak a language, we aim to achieve a neutral point of view and provide more extended information. We want to maintain one wikipedia bridging the divide between the cultures that use a language. Given the virtually limitless amount of harddrive capacity we have articles on cricket and honkbal. We are happy to host any topic that is of intrest. What this discussion is about, is not about en: or fr: It is about Hopi. By having a Hopi or a Dutch or a Frisian wikipedia, you allow many topics to be narrated with a Hopi, Dutch or Frisian point of view. Not a non-neutral but with a Hopi, Dutch or Frisian point of view. This is good because certain things that are true from an English perspective are plain different and non-neutral from another culture point of view. To put it bluntly, the words mean different things, they have different conotations denying people a resource like that is like denying that languages differ and that languages reflect a culture. The UN has a mother language day. This day is to celebrate the diversity of the cultures of the world. All languages have a need for good information, that is what wikimedia aims to provide. The argument that the Dutch can read and write English and do not their own wikipedia is great. It only reminds me of a recent tiff I was in, where I was accused of not being able to express myself in English... So please allow me to read and write in Nederlands and, I will not be asking for a wikipedia in Westfries. :) And I do apologize for my poor English (or was it apologise ...) I would almost accept your point if you agree to only read French or Chinese in future. You will find how much it will divorce you from the culture that you live in. Thanks, GerardM

Delirium wrote: To expand on this, I think that every language's viewpoint should bridge *all* cultures, to the extent possible, not just all cultures that speak that language. That is, the Greek Wikipedia should not only be a consensus of Greek-speaking people (i.e. Greeks and Cypriots). It should attempt, as much as possible, to present things neutrally, so that even a Turk who reads Greek (and there are quite a few) could read an article on the Greek-Turkish conflict on the Greek Wikipedia and agree that it's a neutral article, not an article from the Greek perspective. This is of course easier to do in languages which have more diverse cultures speaking them---the en: Wikipedia is constantly moving away from being a U.S. perspective through the efforts of English speakers from other countries. With languages like Greek, this is harder, but I don't think impossible. Going the other way, I also disagree that languages should have more content on their local cultures. This will happen initially just because of what people are interested in, but there's no reason it has to stay that way. I personally am planning to go through and translate hundreds of articles on local German universities to en:, so that eventually en:'s coverage of small Germany universities will be on par with de:'s, and on par with en:'s coverage of U.S. and U.K. universities. -Mark

"the usual"? Most languages don't use grammatical devices to separate time, but rather use separate words if it's relevant and exclude it if it's not. Hopi does have a distinction between past and present, as do all languages, it's just not nessecarily inherently grammatical. Mark On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:33:47 -0800, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:

Shh... don't say that too loudly, or we'll get a Serbian or a Croatian or a Bosnian in here telling you how they're vastly different languages and how you have no idea what you're talking about and all sorts of other nationalist bull. That isn't to say there aren't differences between the three, just that they're smaller than nationalists would like to have you believe. Serbian nationalist Mr Nikola Smolenski of en.wikipedia and sr.wikipedia would like us to revise Wikipedia to have Bosnian considered a dialect of Serbian, along with Montenegrin, both of which are very widely considered to be separate languages and if anything are dialects of "Serbo-Croatian" rather than "Serbian". AaMoF, he has been somewhat successful with his POV-pushing regarding Montenegrin - it is obvious, at least to me, when reading [[:en:Montenegrin language]] that he had a hand in multiple revisions, but I don't dare {{sofixit}} because I have seen him tear other users to shreds over it, although admittedly [[User:Montenegrin]]'s contributions bordered on POV-pushing themselves. Mark On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 20:39:44 +0000, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: