On 02/05/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
Speaking only for myself, I often try to talk to
people from all the
different language editions of wikipedia. I like to know what level of
English a person feels comfortable with so that I can try to accomodate
them as much as possible if necessary. I enjoy taking the time to
review things that I have written, asking myself whether I have used an
obscure word when a common word would suffice, etc.
Now that's a good point - WP's other than en. So perhaps someday a
French speaker will realise he can chat to me in French on en, rather
than in English. Probably a more likely scenario with less common
languages though.
I have to say, editing a Wikipedia where you don't speak the language
at all is a pretty interesting experience - and not quite as pointless
as it sounds. When you a good free image, it's probably worthwhile
adding it to several different wikipedias, but it can be a real
challenge for the following reasons:
* the interface is totally in the foreign language (could this be a
user setting?)
* it's hard to know what to put as an edit summary - do you just leave
it in English?
* different WPs seem to have different conventions on Wikitext markup.
For example, French WP seems to put category and stub tags up the top,
rather than at the bottom.
* no single login ;)
It would be good if the barriers to English speakers contributing to
non-English Wikipedias could be reduced somewhat. Or even if some
mechanisms whereby in one hit you could alert all the talk pages of
all the interwiki articles that link to/from this article that there
is some juicy new image/chunk of text/piece of news that they might
want to add.
Steve