[Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again

Teofilo teofilowiki at gmail.com
Tue Jun 22 11:10:31 UTC 2010


News from the front.

A very bad and unfair unbalance of power was established in favor of
English on Wikimedia Commons in 2005-2006, requiring people from the
world to work for the benefit of the English language community.

In that ocean of unfairness, there was a small island where you could
find comfort and grace : biological taxa: the names of animals and
plants. For centuries the scientific community had been used to using
latin, creating a space where scientists from the world are nearer to
being equals, everybody needing to leave her/his native tongue and use
a foreign language. Wikimedia Commons had decided to name categories
accordingly.

I have discovered a few days ago that someone, probably in good faith
and unaware of this language policy, created [[:Category:Animals by
common named groups]] which is a container for English-named
biological taxa, at the end of 2008.

Now I find people pushing for this container and English named wild
animal species. So the front line is broken.

More reading at :

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Category:Wolves

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Biologie/Le_caf%C3%A9_des_biologistes#Cat.C3.A9gories_en_latin_en_danger_sur_Commons




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