[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

[Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales]

Mark Williamson wrote:
> "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)?

I would say something closer to the latter.  If *really* pressed to be
specific, what I would say is that we would like to have Wikipedia
available in _at least_ enough languages that 99.99% of the people who
can read, can read wikipedia comfortably.

> 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?

I would say that it is a sideline.  But if we found enough committed
people to build it, I see no problem with it in this case.  There are
some technical/social constraints here that we have to deal with of
course, so I'm not suggesting that if you go find 3 native speakers of
Hopi we should (or should not) launch a wiki for them.

We can distinguish between our _central_ purpose for multi-lingual
work (which is to bring an encyclopedia to everyone in the world) and
the _secondary_ purpose of cultural/language preservation.  The second
is something I also support, but it is secondary.

> 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.

Yes.  I think a lot of difficulty has been caused by high emotions
surrounding a type of case which is significantly different from Hopi.
Dialects are much more difficult to decide about, as are cases where
the written language is the same but the spoken language different.

In cases such as these, it is very hard to know where to draw the
lines.

--Jimbo