[Foundation-l] Push translation

[stevertigo]

Muhammad Yahia <shipmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
>   Where is the community? where is the involvement and exchange of ideas and
>   continuous evolvement of articles? where's the wiki in wikipedia?
>   - I see it as POV to assume that wiki x has the 'perfect' article on a
>   certain subject such that everyone in the world needs to read that version  only.

You raise some important points. The understanding of
community-building is a key insight, and I think everyone here
appreciates it. I understand that it's not enough to just "push" an
article over to Swahili, for example, if 1) the translation is not
sufficiently understandable on its own, if 2) the receiving language
editors aren't practiced in how to handle such content, or if 3) the
sender doesn't leave a note in a "lingua franca" explaining what its
purpose is.

Note that the idea is not that only English language articles will
"push" over to other languages - the idea is that other languages may
have articles about topics which could be "pushed" over to English as
well.

There has been perhaps a natural sense that there is some kind of
encyclopedic imperialism inherent to the idea. There is also an
assumption among many here that language is always relativistic and of
cultural essence, or that English Wikipedia's 3.4 million articles are
just out of the scope of relevance to other languages. I'd like to
dispel those notions, but that would be out of scope for this
particular email.

-SC