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

[Daniel Mayer]

On Monday 07 October 2002 12:03 pm,The Cunctator wrote:
> At the same time, I want to point out that having one Wikipedia be the
> default one (e.g. www.wikipedia.org goes to a particular (the English
> language, in this case) Wikipedia) has real benefits for the goals of
> the project.

www.wikipedia.org can and should be where the wiki for the non-profit exists. 
That main page would act as a portal to the various project and the Recent 
Changes at www.wikipedia.org could display Recent Changes for all Wikipedia 
Encyclopedias. I see greater benefits with this plan than the status quo. 

> In short, we want to avoid balkanization of wikipedia. We need French,
> Spanish, Chinese, Madagascaran nationals working on the English-language
> Wikipedia if we want to head toward an overall NPOV.

But we /will/ have people of all languages working on Wikipedia. Interlanguage 
links and having the ability to set your preferences to show Recent Changes 
in as many languages as you want will make it easy to work on several 
different language projects at once. 

> There's a reason that science, diplomacy, and academia always
> consolidate around a particular language (Latin -> French -> English).
> It's because those disciplines need a pool of neutrality that's as large
> as possible.

So we should discard the non-English Wikipedias then? Doesn't their very 
existence tend to take bi/multi-lingual people away from the English 
Wikipedia (which is the lingua Franca of the Internet)? Rubbish. Having 
integration will benefit all Wikipedia encyclopedia's. 

> It's not better for the project if everyone just sticks to their native
> language.

But they won't if we add additional interlanguage functionality. Even if we 
only have interlanguage links as we do now people will drift back and forth a 
lot. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)