On 10/26/02 11:10 AM, "elian" elian@gmx.li wrote:
The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com writes:
Unfortunately, voting is not really a good way of running things. See Meatball:VotingIsEvil.
I don't intend to put any more effort in a design when it's dubious that a multilingual international page will ever get realized - and for knowing this it is essentially to find out what a majority of people wants.
But it's not a way to find out what a majority of people wants. It's a way to find out how many people there are who subscribe to the list, agree with your way of defining the issues, and like putting X's in boxes.
And what's the point in finding out what a majority of people want? You should want to do the right thing.
In the United States, the majority of people want (according to polls) the death penalty, more spent on education and other social services, fewer taxes, more surveillance, bigger cars, cleaner air, war in Iraq, etc. So?
And I think it is neither useful to engage in discussions how future detail problems can be solved (they can be solved - esperanto.net integrates 57 languages, a number that Wikipedia will reach maybe far in the future).
One thing to recognize that people seem to be losing sight of is that Wikipedia's primary purpose is not as a language portal. I say this because http://europa.eu.int/ and esperanto.net/ are being used as comparative examples. The European Union is prima facie an international coalition. Esperanto was explicitly designed to be a synthetic international language. Wikipedia's primary purpose is not to be an international coalition, or to solve the issues of multilingualism.
That said, multilingualism is certainly crucial to the central purpose of Wikipedia, which is to build a complete encyclopedia.
And that is the perspective from which this issue should be considered.