On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 12:17:01 -0700, Philip Welch <wikipedia(a)philwelch.net> wrote:
They will presumably read Wikipedia in their first
language. It's
rather imperialist of us to presume that they should read the English
language Wikipedia just because it's difficult for us to do
translations--more imperialist, I dare say, than having [[Georgia]]
as a disambiguation page.
Your presumption is obviously wrong. My mother toungue is Bengali and Google offers its
interface in Bengali, but I use the English interface because the Bengali version is of
such a low quality. Similarly, the ENglish wikipedia is far better than Wikipedias in even
those languages we do have a sizable one, so people will read it in English.
Still, it's true that a large (possibly majority) portion of WIkipedia users are
American. SO the question we need to ask is, is this Systemic Bias desirable? Should
WIkipedia cater to the tastes of its majority of users or to the majority of its potential
users? Do we seek to be usable for the global population or for the American population?
It seems from previous discussions that there's no consensus on this issue.
Molu
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