[WikiEN-l] Multilingual?

[Charles Matthews]

 "Delirium" wrote

> Charles Matthews wrote:
>
> >Because the lowest common denominator of English-speaking users is to
know
> >nothing about other cultures, this argument in effect can always be used
to
> >lower standards of cultural sensitivity. The worry is that we then get a
> >tabloid version, not something compatible with scholarly practice.
> >
> >Therefore I say this is an intrusion of journalistic thinking, into an
> >encyclopedia; where it is inappropriate.
> >
> >
> I'm not sure I entirely agree with this view.  An encyclopedia _should_,
> I think, have something in common with journalistic practice, and not be
> entirely a scholarly work.

Something: it should be well written.  Something else: when there is plenty
of time to check facts, fact-checking should apply.

>If someone wants a scholarly work on a
> particular subject, there are already plenty available; the only value
> an encyclopedia adds is having a convenient summary of various things in
> a manner understandable by the majority of people (including those who
> are not experts in the field being discussed).

Synthesis adds hugely to value.

> Part of this is simply
> using language as it is used by people, not using jargon specific to a
> scholarly field that is not in widespread usage.  To take your example,
> "chess" is a well-understood term by the vast majority of English
> speakers, used to refer to the game known as, well, "chess".  A "chess
> variant", again in standard usage, would be anything other than standard
> chess (Fischer random chess, for example).  Using other terminology
> would be rather confusing.

It is being argued that xiangqi (Chinese chess) is appropriately labelled
'chess variant', when it predates chess and can't be a variant of it. So
it's like saying soccer is a 'gridiron variant'.

> This is fairly standard encyclopedia practice: when you open Britannica,
> for example, you find things for the most part described in plain
> English, using words with their commonly accepted meanings.  I'm not
> sure how this gets us a "tabloid version", and think that grossly
> underestimates the quality of many of our articles.  At the very least,
> we're "as bad as" the New York Times, not the National Enquirer.

Tabloid journalism isn't bad journalism, necessarily, and is a stricter
discipline on the writer.  That's not the issue, here.

It's the argument here that readers shouldn't mind soccer, rugby, Australian
Rules and so on being called 'gridiron variant', in the teeth of history and
cultural senstivities, because it is easier to talk to a mass readership in
those terms.

It troubles me, because it shouldn't be a case simply of counting heads in
the readership.  In particular it goes against internationalism in the
project.

Charles