[Wikipedia-l] Re: Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia

[Elisabeth Bauer]

Evan Prodromou wrote:

> I think the big thing to understand is that each wiki takes time,
> effort, and money to maintain. Each wiki is a security risk, both
> technically and legally; an active community can offset this risk as
> well or better than fancy technological security measures.

I fully agree with Evan here. But I want to add some other points which 
are largely neglected so far. Maintaining a wiki is not only about 
getting some people to work there, we also need to ensure that local 
communities get to know and share the fundamental values and principles 
of wikipedia: neutrality, openess, freedom of content.

During the creation of arabic wikipedia I acted as advisor - and I 
experienced how many questions arise for intelligent and good-willing 
people not involved with wikipedia before (How do I deal with a copyvio? 
How to deal with total crap? How to deal with a POV article? What about 
naming conventions? Which policies do we need? etc...)

There's a lot of knowledge about wikipedia customs and processes needed 
to get a new wiki started. So far we let people find out on their own - 
or not.

Yesterday a friend translated a sentence on the main page of the tatar 
wikipedia for me: "Tatarlar Böyek! Yäşäsen Törki Dönya!" - "Die Tataren 
sind groß! Es lebe die türkische Welt!" (in german, since I don't know 
how to translate this in english). But the equivalent would be the 
french putting "Vive la France" on their main page. All three sysops 
there edited the page later, noone removed the sentence.

greetings,
elian