[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?

[Austin Hair]

2010/12/9 KIZU Naoko <aphaia at gmail.com>:
> I don't support this word choice: on twitter.com Japanese speaking
> reader mistook it as "one of English Wikipedia admins" "someone who
> writes articles" etc.
>
> Not only "smaller" projects but also on the Wikipedia, this factual
> error is better to correct I think. I heard it placed only on enwiki
> (in a downtime I haven't confirmed yet), but English is no mother
> tongue of every reader of the English Wikipedia. Factual error and
> language barriers may spread false information.

Not to mention cultural barriers.  In Wikipedia communities with (to
me, uncomfortably) structured hierarchies—"Senior Editor," "Editor
Second Class," "Senior Chief Petty Editor"—this is bound to confuse
the heck out of people.  As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, we
have enough problems trying to differentiate between Wikileaks and
Wikimedia; having to revisit Wikimedia vs. Wikipedia is understandably
frustrating to those of us who've spent years explaining the
difference.

It's easy to point fingers at an almost exclusively North American
staff and cry "cultural ignorance," but I'm not—I know that plenty of
people on staff have years of experience working across cultures, even
if it's talking to foreigners on IRC.

I wonder, though, who on staff can name the editor ranks on zhwiki?

Austin

> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 10:55 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Philippe Beaudette
>> <pbeaudette at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>> FWIW....
>>>
>>> The word Wikipedia wasn't supposed to make it to sister sites, and that's being fixed right now, so pardon my quick note... I'll write a bit more later about the term as being used on Wikipedia, but the error in pushing it out to sister sites is being corrected right now, so I wanted to acknowledge that...
>>
>> Wikipedia does not have an Executive Director, or anything of the
>> sort.  That title suggests that Sue has the final say over content.  I
>> don't think it should be used anywhere.
>>
>> But, thanks for at least removing it from the 'smaller' projects.
>>
>> --
>> John Vandenberg
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子
> member of Wikimedians in Kansai  / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会 http://kansai.wikimedia.jp
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