[Wikipedia-l] The Wikpedia family and the Spanish reunification effort)

[Daniel Mayer]

Since this concerns the English Wikipedia in a direct way I am cross-posting 
with wikipedia-l. 

On Saturday 05 October 2002 12:01 pm, Stephen G. wrote:
> One disturbing thing is that Edgar still views the
> English Wikipedia as a solely American enterprise,
> rather than an international effort. I find this
> saddening, especially since many of our contributors
> are not American (e.g., me). 

Yep - Edgar's perception is unfortunate but ever since we started talking 
about reunification I have come to see that this view is also /completely/ 
understandable (especially for people who equate the English language with 
American cultural imperialism - which seems to be increasingly common among 
non-English speakers in the world); 

1) Before Phase III came along the non-English Wikipedias were waiting for 
ages to get an upgrade while depending on well intentioned yet still empty 
promises. Granted Phase II had major problems that exhausted the developers 
time but this didn't seem to be communicated very well to the non-English 
Wikipedias (another thing is that the modified Phase II software at 
Encyclopedia Libre seems to be working fine). The non-English Wikipedians 
therefore understandably felt left-out. 

Issue being solved;
Now each wiki is being upgraded as fast as the volunteer staff of developers 
and translators can convert the databases.

2) Then there is also the issue that interlanguage links went only one way 
(to the "foreign" languages from the "main" English articles).

Issue being solved;
As soon as each language is on-line with the new software there will be 
inter-language links going in every direction. I will personally help with 
this job.

3) Then there is the fact that Wikipedia was at .com and a majority of 
non-English users wanted it at .org (or so I gather). There was also the 
related perception that almost all Wikipedia publicity pointed to the English 
Wikipedia as if it were the only one. And if the non-English Wikipedias were 
mentioned at all it was as a minor side note.

Issue mostly solved;
Now the English Wikipedia is at .org and so are each converted wiki. There 
really hasn't been any new publicity so I can't say there has been any 
improvement in that department. 

4) Now that the .org conversion has been made, another thing of concern is 
that the English Wikipedia is at www.wikipedia.org and all the other 
languages are relegated to xx.wikipedia.org as if the English Wikipedia were 
/the/ Wikipedia (or at least the most important one in some symbolic sense).

Issue is being seriously worked on and discussed;
There are now tentative plans to move the English Wikipedia to 
en.wikipedia.org and have www.wikipedia.org be a multilingual gateway to the 
entire Wikipedia (all languages). I now fully support this move and will work 
to make it happen.
Visit 
http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org
and help with creating a new Main Page for the /whole/ project.

5) There is also the fact that an American company owns Wikipedia's server 
and effectively owns the name "wikipedia". 

Issue is being seriously worked on;
Now Jimbo and a few others (including lawyers who also happen to be 
Wikipedians) are in the process working-out how to set-up a non-profit. Jimbo 
seems to be very serious about this and I completely trust that this will 
happen, but to make sure it does, several of us loud Wikipedians are serious 
about holding him to this (However, setting-up the non-profit smartly and 
cheaply may take some time though). 

A related issue is that at one time there was semi-serious talk about having 
some type of advertisements on Wikipedia. 

Issue solved;
Jimbo has also promised that there will never be ads on Wikipedia. I will 
personally advocate that this is written in the preamble for the non-profit's 
constitution or in some other way to make it permanent. 

Wikipedia does not need paid staff. Therefore servers, bandwidth, domain fees 
and electricity are the only real expenses we have. Jimbo has already said he 
will pay domain fees, for bandwidth and presumably electricity, but if it 
were needed, all costs could be paid for by a relatively small number of 
modest monthly contributions to a non-profit Wikipedia Foundation. 

6) A current issue that I would like to put forward is that the English 
Wikipedia policy mailing list is at wikipedia-l as if policy decisions made 
for the English Wikipedia apply to the other languages. 

Issue open;
This is /not/ the case but I can understand why some people might get this 
impression after seeing that the mailing lists for the non-English  
Wikipedias are at xx-wiki-l (if I remember correctly) and also seeing that 
some things which obviously pertain to the /whole/ project are discussed on 
the English mailing list (oftentimes without cross-posts to intl-l). 

After the non-profit is set-up I propose that wikipedia-l /only/ be used for 
the non-profit's business and for working out issues that affect the entire 
project (hosting it at wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org would also be nice. There is 
little reason to keep it on the Nupedia server.). The English-specific 
mailing list would then be at en-wiki-l (or whatever the naming convention 
is) and will only be about English Wikipedia-specific matters. 

> However, even he seems in
> favor of reunification, albeit very reluctantly.

It is a very good thing that Edgar is in favor of reunification, even 
reluctantly. The impression that I got from several off-list discussions with 
a person very familiar with the original fork is that Edgar was one of the 
most vocal opponents of being associated with Wikipedia in the past. We 
should even ask him what else we could do to make him feel more comfortable 
with reunification. For that matter, I would like to ask /all/ Wikipedians of 
every language this related question;  

What can Jimbo and the English Wikipedia community reasonably do to make you 
feel more comfortable and a part of a larger multilingual Wikipedia 
community? I of course only speak for myself and only ask this question to 
gather information and spark discussion.


I would like all the different language Wikipedias to be a family where the 
non-profit Wikipedia Foundation is the symbolic mother and the different 
language Wikipedias are symbolic siblings. In my estimation that would then 
make Jimbo the symbolic father (in the same way Linus Torvalds is the 
symbolic father of Linux) since he was the person who thought of the crazy 
idea of having a free as in Libre encyclopedia (Hm, I guess that makes Larry 
the symbolic mid-wife and nanny. Sorry Larry I couldn't resist an opportunity 
to lighten-up this looong post ;-).

Sorry for the length of this post, but this has been on my mind ever since I 
first asked about the status of Encyclopedia Libre vs the Spanish Wikipedia 
and how that relates to the upcoming upgrade. 

At first this was just a feeling I had, but now I think I have begun the 
process of understanding why there was a Spanish Wikipedia fork and also why 
many contributors to the non-English Wikipedias sometimes/often feel left-out 
as second class Wikipediacitizens. 

Yours very much in the WikiWay;

Daniel Mayer (aka mav)