On Monday 07 October 2002 12:03 pm,The Cunctator wrote:
At the same time, I want to point out that having one Wikipedia be the default one (e.g. www.wikipedia.org goes to a particular (the English language, in this case) Wikipedia) has real benefits for the goals of the project.
www.wikipedia.org can and should be where the wiki for the non-profit exists. That main page would act as a portal to the various project and the Recent Changes at www.wikipedia.org could display Recent Changes for all Wikipedia Encyclopedias. I see greater benefits with this plan than the status quo.
In short, we want to avoid balkanization of wikipedia. We need French, Spanish, Chinese, Madagascaran nationals working on the English-language Wikipedia if we want to head toward an overall NPOV.
But we /will/ have people of all languages working on Wikipedia. Interlanguage links and having the ability to set your preferences to show Recent Changes in as many languages as you want will make it easy to work on several different language projects at once.
There's a reason that science, diplomacy, and academia always consolidate around a particular language (Latin -> French -> English). It's because those disciplines need a pool of neutrality that's as large as possible.
So we should discard the non-English Wikipedias then? Doesn't their very existence tend to take bi/multi-lingual people away from the English Wikipedia (which is the lingua Franca of the Internet)? Rubbish. Having integration will benefit all Wikipedia encyclopedia's.
It's not better for the project if everyone just sticks to their native language.
But they won't if we add additional interlanguage functionality. Even if we only have interlanguage links as we do now people will drift back and forth a lot.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
The more I find entried like [[SCSI voodoo]], the more I wonder what to do about them.
I've just added an opening paragraph, explaining a) the context b) the fact that it's obscure computing slang c) the fact that the rest of the article is not to be taken *entirely* seriously
Jimbo recently said that one long-term goal of Wikipedia is the production of cheap paper encyclopedias for developing countries. This is something I would fully support -- it would be tremendous if what we do here reaches more than just the lucky few who have net access.
But now I keep having visions of kids in a school somewhere reading about SCSI voodoo and not realising it's tongue-in-cheek. (the same argument goes for slapping the words "fictional character" on many, many articles)
FOLDOC is a good source: it's a cleanly-written documentation. Some entries from the Jargon File are good, but so many of them strike me as a microcommunity writing about itself -- it's not an encyclopedia, but a parody of one. I can even hear Comic-Book Guy's voice reading them.
Perhaps one step would be to merge all the articles on voodoo-inspired hacker lingo into just that: [[voodoo-inspired hacker slang]]. At least that would stand some chance of being more than disctionary entries: there would be potential for an overview of the linguistic trend, reasons, etc. (suggestions for a better page name on a postcard ;)
On Tue, 08 Oct 2002 08:15:13 tarquin wrote:
Perhaps one step would be to merge all the articles on voodoo-inspired hacker lingo into just that: [[voodoo-inspired hacker slang]]. At least that would stand some chance of being more than disctionary entries: there would be potential for an overview of the linguistic trend, reasons, etc. (suggestions for a better page name on a postcard ;)
Yep.
I think it's instructive to note that the print version of the Jargon File is known as "The New Hacker's *Dictionary*". Not, "The New Hacker's Encyclopedia".
--- tarquin tarquin@planetunreal.com wrote:
The more I find entried like [[SCSI voodoo]], the more I wonder what to do about them.
<snip>
Perhaps one step would be to merge all the articles on voodoo-inspired hacker lingo into just that: [[voodoo-inspired hacker slang]]. At least that would stand some chance of being more than disctionary entries: there would be potential for an overview of the linguistic trend, reasons, etc. (suggestions for a better page name on a postcard ;)
I've always been in favour of simply removing hacker slang. The Jaron File already does it better, and it's public domain. Why duplicate the effort, especially since it arguably falls outside of our scope?
Stephen G.
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