[Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 57, Issue 8

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

I actually think that what is being discussed is a wrong division. Let me
give my point of view, which I have discussed on several occasions with
kv75, a ru.wp admin. We can roughly divide all content of Wikipedia (I am
less familiar with other projects) into three big groups. Let us call them
"pop-content", "common-knowledge content" and "expert content".

"Common knowledge" is a collection of topics a person with some education
has something to say about. Those include biographies, history, geography,
movies, books etc. I guess this is what most of the posters in this thread
have in mind. And here we indeed need many languagues, since, for
instance, an article on a certain book of Agnon is best written frist by a
Hebrew speaker, and eventually translated into different languages, and
supplemented by an info on various traslations. This clearly helps to
spread the knowledge among people speaking different languages. And in
this context, "fails" means just an inactive project, with no editors able
to build up this kind of content. It does not mean that say in a year such
editors would appear.

"Pop" is the information on the subjects like computer games, animation
series ets. It is sometimes considered to be of low-level, but we should
remember that 90% of our editors (and may be also readers) are only
interested in this type of information. And the hope is that they
initially get attracted by this type of articles but eventually get grown
up and start also contributiong to the articles on other subjects. Also,
most of them only speak their mothertongue, especially those active in
bigger-language (say with more than 1M speakers) projects.

Finally, "Expert" are the articles which can only be contributed by
editors having special education: science, some humanities, some social
sciences. I am a university professor in physics, and I can indeed confirm
what has been previously written (by geni?) that in physics everything
(well, almost everything) is published in English, all conferences are in
English, and those who do not speak English can not effectively compete.
But the "expert articles" are in a pitiful state, even on en.wp! This
means that in this direction so far we failed as the whole project. Not
80%, but 100% failed. And indeed I believe that here the best articles
should be created on en.wp and eventually get translated (if it is at all
possible, for instance, in Russian the notions invented after 1990s may
just not exist, I am not sure), but the main problem here is not the
language communication but the lack of competent editors creating such
content in the first place.

Cheers
Yaroslav

> There are 732 editable wikis on Wikimedia and nearly all of them are
> active in some way. Just a year ago, these wikis were getting hit by
> loads of spambots and malbots and barely any community to fight them,
> but since then we have seen changes in smaller wikis. Apart from maybe
> 15-20 wikis, I can safely say that most wikis are active and as Jimbo
> mentioned somewhere, it will be good to learn another language as your
> second tongue, preferably those that are spoken a lot more.We spend so
> much time on these language wikipedias, we should atleast try to learn
> something from it :)