[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

[Mark Williamson]

I get everything you say, but would like a little bit of clarification
on one point.

"in their own language" - does this mean "a language that they can, to
a certain degree, comprehend" or "the language they learned natively
as a child before all others" (or rather than that, at least "that
language which in their mind comes before all others" - there can be
various problems with native language retention given certain
circumstances)?

For example, does creating a Hopi Wikipedia (assuming that we had
already found committed people to build it) when there are only just
over 40 monolingual speakers DIRECTLY further the goal of the project,
or is it a sideline to it since the vast majority of the speakers of
this language are nearly equally served by an English Wikipedia?
(although, at least in Arizona, English fluency in Native American
communities is often exaggerated and when somebody "speaks English",
at least if they're old, it often means that they know a few words as
opposed to none at all)

I think that everybody needs to be clear on this. I haven't seen
resentment from you  for minority language Wikipedias, in fact I have
seen a great deal of support, but from some (Sheng Jiong most recently
from some things he said) I have gotten the clear message that they
believe we should only have Wikipedias in LWCs (languages of wider
communication - french, spanish, japanese, afrikaans, dutch, croatian
as opposed to breton, guarani, ainu, venda, limburgish, zulu). Please
note that I am NOT referring to everybody who disagrees with me -
there are many who do not show this viewpoint but still believe  that
more criteria should be required for new Wikipedias.

If this is not part of our main goal as a project, or if it is, I
believe we (or at least I) could use some clarification.

Mark

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 11:16:21 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a
> free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single
> person on the planet in their own language.  Asking whether the
> community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong
> question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.
> 
> I don't know of any real case where there is a genuine strong tension
> between these two things, either.  That is to say, the central core of
> the community, the people who are really doing the work, are virtually
> all quite passionate on this point: that we're creating something of
> extremely high quality, not just goofing around with a game of online
> community with no purpose.
> 
> The community does not come before our task, the community is
> organized *around* our task.  The difference is simply that decisions
> ought to always be made not on the grounds of social expediency or
> popular majority, but in light of the requirements of the job we have
> set for ourselves.
> 
> I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very
> tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any
> way.  If anything, we are *extremely* elitist but anti-credentialist.
> That is, we seek thoughtful intelligent people willing to do the very
> hard work of getting it right, and we don't accept anything less than
> that.  PhDs are valuable evidence of that, and attracting and
> retraining academic specialists is a valid goal.
> 
> There may be some cases of PhDs who think that no one should edit
> their expert articles, but there are many many more cases of
> completely unqualified people who think the same thing.  It doesn't
> matter: if someone can't work in a friendly helpful way in a social
> context, that's a problem for them and for us, and we'll always have
> to make some very complex judgments about what to do about it.
> 
> I'm 100% committed to a goal of "Britannica or better" quality for
> Wikipedia, and all of our social rules should revolve around that.
> Openness is indispensible for us, but it is our *radical* means to our
> radical *ends*.
> 
> --Jimbo
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