[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

[Mark Williamson]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 21:03:39 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> 
> On Mar 9, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
> 
> > What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would
> > like to read about Milwaukee?
> 
> What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are
> being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby
> horses?

"Private hobby horses"? We're talking about languages that are spoken
by real people, not just hobbies.

It is not my responsibility or anybody's for that matter to make sure
any one person's needs are being met. I am more concerned about the
needs of minority language speakers. I think that an English-speaker's
needs are being met by the project much better currently than a
Sinhala speaker (national language of Srilanka) or a Hopi speaker.

If you are concerned about the "vast majority of our readers", then
you can go ahead and take care of their needs if you are so interested
in doing that and feel it's not already being done.

If you want to start a thread about some sort of need of the "vast
majority of our readers", you are quite welcome to. There are no
restrictions on this list about "Thou shalt post exclusively regarding
the Vast Majority of Thy Readers" or "Thou shalt post exclusively
regarding the Minority Languages".

So quit whinging about these needs that we are supposedly not
discussing or taking care of enough and start a thread on these
"shortcomings".

> The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the
> community's activities push towards the best possible knowledge source
> while restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the
> pedia.

I'm going to have to say to this, "Duh." Stating the painfully obvious.

> After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical
> wikis, I am going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be
> represented in proportion to their importance.

"Importance" cannot be objectively measured. Any definition of
"importance" that ties it down to any one measurable trait will
obviously be hotly disputed.


> Overwhelmingly our
> readers are in major languages, and the challenges facing these large
> wikipedias should be occupying far more of the discussion than is
> currently the case.

That's your POV. If you want more discussions on "major languages"'
Wikipedias, go ahead and initiate some. Quit whinging about how we
talk too much about minority languages and too little about majority
languages, and start some discussions.

I don't see how NPOV applies to majority vs. minority languages.

Our goal is to provide an open-content encyclopaedia usable by every
single person on earth, gratis. Quite a while ago, Jimbo added to this
goal the additional goal of neutrality (and as has been shown, not
everybody even agrees on what is neutral)

If it is to be usable by everybody, this means we cannot simply ignore
minority languages. I don't have the statistics right here, but a very
significant percentage of human beings speak languages with less than
1 million speakers as their native language. This is largely in
Africa, Central America, Indonesia, New Guinea, India, and other
undeveloped areas, but even developed areas have their fair share of
minority languages, mostly with less than 1m speakers but sometimes
with more (Catalan, Galician, Sardinian, &c).

Now, if you want to propose that we delete all minority language
Wikipedias, you are welcome to do so but you will definitely not have
much support because some of our largest Wikipedias are in minority
languages - Catalan, Kurdish, Tatar, Basque, Welsh...

Mark