[Wikipedia-l] Advertisement on mainpage

Mark Williamson node.ue at gmail.com
Thu Feb 17 04:34:43 UTC 2005


Hi, I have a question to put forth.

I do not wish to have a disagreement with the members of a just
recently active Wikipedia for fear of scaring them away, so it's
better to discuss it here.

Recently, I removed the spam/advertisement-ish text from the mainpage
of the Wolof Wikipedia.

It was reverted, twice, by the currently active Wolof-speaking user,
Yannick Duchesne.

I feel however that it violates policy.

A rough translation: «ANAFA (National Association for Literacy and
Adult Education), an organisation in Dakar, Senegal is now working on
the translation of open-source software like SPIP
(http://www.spip.net) (a speedy Internet publisher to manage
magazine-sites).

Cooperating with the Canadian organization "Alternatives
(http://www.alternatives.ca)", we plan very soon to edit the Wolof
(http://wo.wikipedia.com), Pulaar (http://ff.wikipedia.com) and
Mandinke  Wikipedias and work with every NGO in Africa to promote
African languages on the net.

This is within the category of a rebellion against linguistic
discrimination and inequality (particularly bad online) and for the
equality, solidarity, and diversity of cultures.

ANAFA and Alternatives ask academians - especially Africans - to
upload here their original copyleft documentation in Wolof and any
other African language.

More equality and freedom will come from it!»

I have emphasised that the mainpage is supposed to be an introduction
to Wikipedia. I even tried removing the POV parts and moving it to a
separate article at [[ANAFA]], but apparently this was not enough.

I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, or what is appropriate - is
it OK to have such text on the mainpage at all?

Also, Yannick claims to have read Wikipedia documentation extensively
and so there is supposedly no issue with his understanding of NPOV.

Mark



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