The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com writes:
- There doesn't seem to be any major philosophical objection to a browser
localization redirect of "http://www.wikipedia.org/".
I have nine browsers on my computer (needed for webdesign and some other purposes). Some don't even have a localize-option and do you think I bother to configure the rest? So I get english all the time.
My mother doesn't even know that her browser has a localize-option and she doesn't speak english and - yes, she thinks also that webadresses always start with www. However, she would be a great contributor to the German wikipedia. Have you ever watched non-computer experienced people using their computer? Just ask how many know their browser preferences.
Esperanto is not available as language option in all of my browsers. De facto, by depending only on browser settings, we would deprive the Esperanto wikipedia of many possible contributors (who would be enthusiastic discovering an esperanto encyclopedia but have no interest at all in contributing to yet another english encyclopedia)
Next, I want to see the progress of all wikipedias at one central place and not somewhere hidden at an obscure statistics page somewhere at the english (Main?) wikipedia where nobody of the non-english contributors bothers to look for regularly. The version I proposed stimulates competition.
Lastly, I want to have a simple, not crowded page to search wikipedia where I am not disturbed by masses of text and I have to look very sharply to discover the small "search" field in one corner.
If we want to be an encyclopedia, we should offer people an attractive interface for quick and easy searching wikipedia - and where could this be better placed than on the Main Page www.wikipedia.org? If I am somewhere and I simply want to know something, I don't want categories, introductions and masses of links: I want a search box, cursor already placed in it, type in something and get my results.
I only see a secondary philosophical objection. The objection is based on the argument that first people should be encouraged to contribute to the Eng-lang Wikipedia before others, not from the principle that English is better, but from the principle that "from a strict efficiency point of view, the goal of a comprehensive and neutral encyclopedia would benefit from dealing with issues in only one central article with as many actors as possible debating/working together rather than several different articles with only a couple of persons in each place, even though they are updating their own articles from the other wikis", as Anthere eloquently put it. (I'm not claiming she advocates this position. She just described it well.) This objection would be pretty much obviated with better backend integration and interlanguage tools.
If this is the case I vote for abandoning the other language wikipedias, but I am not sure if I understood you right: you build sentences of German length.
Besides, I am no philosopher, my objections are not philosophical but practical. If you like to engage in philosophical discussions I suggest a philosophy forum, not wikipedia-mailinglist.
We have one thing in common: we both object balcanization, however our interpretation seem to vary.
I think a wikipedia, each language on a separate URL without a centralized - and a really centralized - main page is a bundle of balkanized projects. If this remains like this, I prefer to stay in the nice, peaceful, balkanized German wikipedia without having to think about the others around - at least we have www.wikipedia.de. Maybe the dutch, the french, the polish and so on could also reserve .nl, .fr, .pl...
greetings, elian