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.