[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Casey Brown]

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 1:39 AM, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedias are not for _cultures_, they are for languages. If I and

I'm surprised to hear that coming from someone who I thought to be a
student of languages.  I think you might want to read an
article from today's Wall Street Journal, about how language
influences culture (and, one would extrapolate, Wikipedia articles).
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html>

> 1,000 other Americans suddenly learnt French (to the point of
> native-level fluency) and decided to read and edit the French
> Wikipedia, it would "belong" to us just as much as to anybody else.
> This came up recently in the debate about the Acehnese Wikipedia. Some
> people said that all Acehnese were Muslim (not true - there is a small
> community of Acehnese Christians). They said that if anyone is
> Christian, they'd be ejected from Acehnese society and therefore no
> longer Acehnese. However, they'd not stop speaking the Acehnese
> language.
>
> Nobody claims the English WP is for US/Commonwealth cultures only...
> this is reasonable when a Wiki is tiny, but as it grows large it's
> important that NPOV mean "neutral point of view for EVERYBODY", not
> just "a point of view that everybody in OUR country can agree upon",
> etc.
>

No one suggested that it was about "a point of view that everyone in OUR
country can agree upon".  No one's suggesting that anyone "owns" a
wiki or that you're not welcome to contribute.  It's just that
different wikis/languages are different and have different articles.
Some focus on different topics based on what they usually do, some try
to tackle the subject scholarly, some probably don't focus on blame
(see the article's commentary on Japanese/Spanish views of accidental
events), etc.

-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023