Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
What language should be used in the Encyclopedia? The English language used in the UK and other parts of the world differs from that used in North America. Translating an encyclopedia into another language is an overwhelming project. It should be done by someone who translates it into his native language. One approach might be to follow each paragraph in English by the paragraph translated into the other language. This could be tried out gradually, adding more and more of an article and then starting on a few other articles
This brings up two separate points I think: one is which dialect of a language to use (where multiple exist), and the other is how to deal with actually different languages.
Taking the second point first, the way we deal with this is to have separate encyclopedias. This can be supplemented by translating from each other (and in fact anyone who is fluent in more than one language is greatly encouraged to do so), but may also simply be original content provided by a native speaker of that language. Currently these are located at xx.wikipedia.org, where xx is a 2-letter language code (for example, de.wikipedia.org for the German-language Wikipedia). Keeping all the languages in sync would ideally be nice, but in practice is nearly impossible.
As for the first point, the English-language Wikipedia solves this by for the most part not caring whether you use British or American English. Articles specifically about one or the other country generally are encouraged to use that dialect (for example, American English for the article on [[George Washington]], and British English for the article on [[England]]), but for most articles either is okay. The policy is generally to let the author of the article use whichever they wish, and then to keep subsequent additions in the same dialect. Some effort is also made to avoid particularly provincial idiom and slang; thus most Americanisms that would only be understood by an American are avoided if possible, as are the Gaelic-influenced idioms of Hiberno-English and anything particular to Australian idiom. As not everyone realizes what's provincial, this is generally enforced by someone from a different region saying on the talk page "I have no idea what this sentence means," after which it is usually rephrased in a more generally understood manner (or explained further in parentheses).
I do not know how other languages with dialects handle the issue. Perhaps someone from the French Wikipedia can comment on how that encyclopedia handles French as spoken in France versus French as spoken in Quebec; or someone from the Spanish Wikipedia might be able to comment on Spanish as spoken in Spain versus Spanish as spoken in the Americas.
It takes too long to read a long Encyclopedia entry while connected to the Internet so there should be a way to copy it so that it can be read later.
It seems like a great idea to record the encyclopedia on a CD but by the time we can make a copy (an hour) it would be out of date. When a prominent person dies his article needs to be changed, when a government changes or a building is destroyed the encyclopedia needs to be updated.
This is a difficult problem. If the people in question have access to computers, but not access to the internet, a CD is really the only option I can think of. An alternate option for a computer that has intermittent internet access would be to set up a system of incremental updates, whereby the contents of the Wikipedia are downloading for local viewing, and periodically updated by re-downloading the articles changed since the last update. For computers on a slow connection, the local archive might be jump-started by an initial CD version, so only updates need to be downloaded from the internet. Such a system has not yet been developed, to my knowledge, partly because it's unknown how much of a demand there might be for it (and partly simply because nobody's written it).
If it's a small number of articles, a solution is always to print them out for reading at a later time, or copying the text to a file on a computer hard drive.
-Mark