[Foundation-l] Cross-wiki articles

[effe iets anders]

2009/5/3 Ting Chen <wing.philopp op gmx.de>:
>
> My experience is that people outside of Wikipedia community (the pure
> users or people that only heard of Wikipedia) in Germany don't
> differentiate between the qualities of the language versions. I don't
> think that the quality of the German Wikipedia had the impact on the
> outreach to government or libraries. It is more the organization and
> professionalism of the chapter.
>
> Personally I don't think that take the classical encyclopedia as a
> measure is a good thing. The classical encyclopedia was restrained on
> the unpossibility of to print books in such big volumes. An electronic
> encyclopedia has far more possibilities and if we take an old fashioned
> measure as our measurement we artificially abondane some of the
> possibilities that the new technology offer us.
>
> --
> Ting

I think that if the public does /not/ differentiate, that is actually
quite a compliment. That actually shows that the quality is better,
because it corrects for the lower quantity and the assumptions that
English must be better because more people. For example in the
Netherlands, a lot of people still say " well, yes, I use Wikipedia,
but of course only the English, which is much better and extensive" .
This while the Dutch version is absolutely not small (>500k articles)
and imho not with a very low quality. So if people don't
differentiate, that already tells something about the German version
:)

Best, Lodewijk