[Wikipedia-l] Re: multilingualism (was Q1 drive)

[Henry Tan-Tenn]

Mark Williamson sia-kong:

> When Danny or Jimbo or Eloquence or Angela or
> whomever presents the
> concept at a conference, as far as I know they
> either 1) don't mention
> languages except in passing, 2) mention that it's
> multilingual and
> that there are, for example, German and Japanese
> versions or 3)
> mention the fact that it is available in the
> national language.

Just now I listened Jimbo's interview by the NPR journalist Brian Lehrer
, who did mention that Wikipedia had some 160+ languages.  But not
surprisingly this was hardly a central aspect of the story.  I think one 
reason is that the English edition has garnered the most attention due 
to its age, size and activity, and the criticism specifically directed 
at it by the Encyclopedia Britannica and others.  Another is the 
assumption that should en: fail (or be judged to have failed), one can 
safely assume smaller and less active editions will also fail.  So the 
discourse ends up circling around en: as a test case, almost to the 
exclusion of other innovative aspects of Wikipedia.  This is unfortunate 
but probably unavoidable given the limited understanding and experience 
the public has about how wiki works.  But I do agree that 
"multilingualism" should be cited more often as a central 
characteristics of Wikipedia, in the sense that Wikipedia is not merely 
one edition replicated hundreds of times (though I imagine it may feel 
that way to our developers), but rather the whole is more than the 
individual languages put together.  That might sound a bit of a cliche, 
but I think there's something there worth developing.