[Wikipedia-l] Simple English and English look too confusingly similar

[Mark Williamson]

There _is_ no such thing as "the Wikipedia article on".
Wikipedia/ウィキペディア/維基百科/위키백과/װיקיפּעדיע/ויקיפדיה/Wikipédia/Wikiibíídiiya/Vichipedie/ვიკიპედია/ويكيبيديا/ويکيـپـيـډيا/Viquipèdia/Oiquipèdia/Wikipidiya/ਵਿਕਿਪੀਡਿਆ/Вікіпедія/Википедия/Vicipéid/ᏫᎩᏇᏗᏯ/ꀁꇹꀸꄛꀋ/𐍅𐌹𐌺𐌹𐍀𐌰𐌹𐌳𐌴𐌹𐌰/Βικιπαίδεια/Wikipedija/Wicipǽdia/+++
is an INTERNATIONAL project to build a MULTILINGUAL encyclopedia.
There should be multiple articles for each topic, and there are for a
significant portion, in many different languages.

Mark

On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 03:47:19 +0100, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> I just read this blog entry from January:
> http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php
> 
> The author, Danah Boyd, a notable blogger and expert in social networks,
> criticized "the Wikipedia entry" for "social network", but she actually
> referenced the entry on the Simple English Wikipedia. What's worse,
> nobody in the comments corrected her, even though they clearly went to
> the English Wikipedia to look up different topics and compare.
> 
> I suspect Danah googled for the title rather than visiting Wikipedia.
> Picking the wrong site is an easy mistake to make, since, except for the
> word "Simple" in the URL and page title, articles from the two sites
> look exactly the same. The concept of a "Simple English" Wikipedia is
> also not a trivial one to grasp even if someone actually does see it in
> the title, so they may just ignore it and think it's some strange
> Internet thing. After all, many addresses have things like "www10" or
> even arbitrary server names in the front.
> 
> If an expert can make that mistake, I'm sure many other people have,
> wondering why all the Wikipedia articles they looked at were written in
> very juvenile prose and incomplete.
> 
> I strongly recommend that we change the look and feel of the Simple
> English Wikipedia to avoid that confusion, perhaps going so far to add a
> [[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] to that effect. A somewhat different logo would
> also help. The changes I can make without being a sysop are limited,
> though, and Simple is not particularly active, so I thought I'd bring
> this to the attention of the list first.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Erik
> 
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