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

[David Gerard]

Henry Tan-Tenn wrote:

> 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.


I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
fact tested even better!


- d.