[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

[Anthere]

Felix Wan a écrit:
> I am very disappointed.
> 
> Can someone tell me what is the proper way to have this issue discussed
> by more people?  What is the proper procedure to open a project page in
> Meta?  Should I just open a page and hope that it will survive VfD?
> 
> Long time Wikimedians, do not know how frustrating it is for new comers
> to know how we should do things?  We were encourage to be bold, but not
> told of the real community taboos, not warned that we must respond to
> messages, or someone may put us on RfC, say that we are incooperative
> and ban us forever.  I spent a lot of time to help one user out of that.
> 
> Can the community be more friendly to new comers who may not understand
> the tricks and have not contributed much yet?
> 
> Felix Wan

I can only be sympathetic to your point of view Felix.
I have the feeling as well that the wikipedia is less opened than it was 
before. Some do not open their arms as they would have  opened them 2 
years ago. There is a resistance much stronger than before. It does not 
help either that the community is so much bigger, as there is no way 
that one can keep informed about everything. I think it is much more 
difficult to keep a common goal all together.

Example :
There were no discussions about whether to start a new language or not 
before. I am reading all the current discussions with interest, and 
wonder if I should really try to go about african languages. For a 
single reason, some african languages are not spoken by a lot, or some 
african languages are spoken by a lot, but very little written, as many 
people just do not know how to write.

Last comments indicated that making the encyclopedia in many languages 
was not our goal, but only making the encyclopedia that most people 
could read. If such was our goal, I think it would be enough to focus on 
english only, and not care for the few people who do not manage for 
english (making a rough point here). I am absolutely not supportive of 
this point of vew. I present the project as one trying to propose 
information in a language people understand well. The best being the 
mother language. To my opinion, this is also part of our goal. To make 
information available as much as possible in people mother language.

Where does it meet your problem ?

Well, because the bigger we become, the more people insist on quality. 
What was acceptable before, is not acceptable anymore today. When you 
could work on a 2 000 stubby french wikipedia before, now a 2 000 stubby 
african language will be questionned. There is resistance to new 
projects languages, not because it is more bureaucratic, but a lot 
because people feel they have more to protect. A sort of image of 
quality carried by the bigger languages, which does not appreciate the 
stubs in lesser developped languages.

I do not know what to recommand for you to do. You meet the resistance 
of the new stubby language, you meet the fear of "possible doubts on 
language duplication", you meet the resistance born from Node 
insistance. Add the stronger and stronger resistance of a community 
trying to protect what has already been done. Not easy. I hope there is 
more friendlyness in the future.