[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

[David Gerard]

Stirling Newberry 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? 
> 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. 
> 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. 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 assumes it's zero-sum - that someone paying attention to a Hopi or
Cantonese Wikipedia is automatically subtracted from the attention paid
to the English or Mandarin Wikipedia - which you haven't demonstrated at
all is the case, and which I really think isn't the case.


- d.