[Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy "one language - one Wikipedia"

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Fri, 6/25/10, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy "one language - one Wikipedia"
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, June 25, 2010, 1:07 PM
> On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:11 PM,
> phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > But, to be fair, do we ask such questions of our other
> projects? I do
> > not recall being asked if I was a trained encyclopedia
> writer or a
> > trained journalist when I joined Wikimedia :) Perhaps
> we should ask
> > these kinds of hard questions of a new project, but
> also realize that
> > we may not be able to predict all of the answers ahead
> of time.
> 
> My first answer is that Wikipedia is good enough for
> children and that
> we do not need a Wikipedia fork with dumb language. If you
> think
> differently, please find or make relevant research which
> would prove
> your position.
> 
> This type of project is original research per se. (Making
> an image,
> movie or educational game is OR. Making rules for language
> usage is
> POV and OR. Saying that Wikipedia is not good for children
> is POV and
> OR.) And we have to be extremely careful with any kind of
> original
> research. We have two opposing projects in way of handling
> OR:
> Wikinews, which handles it very well and Wikiversity, which
> doesn't.
> And if we are not able to drive well project with
> educational courses
> for adults, I can say that Wikijunior would be a disaster
> after just a
> couple of months of independent life.
> 
> The problem with such projects is that they are usually a
> field for
> self-proclaimed experts to promote their ideological
> agenda. As it is
> about child education, it will be full of very stupid
> explanations,
> like that children are not able to understand this or that
> or that
> children mustn't hear something because it would kill
> them.

Such strong labeling of the goals and make-up of this group wishing to work on a Medical Encyclopedia for Children really needs to be supported by some evidence. Especially as I don't believe they are participating in this conversation and therefore unable to clarify. I am afraid I don't speak German, but I would like to see what I can gather from machine translation if you would please direct me to the proper links.

Birgitte SB