Steve Bennett wrote:
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.
It's actually considered rude on hold conversations in one language on a
project written in another, simply for the reason that most other users
of that project won't be able to read what's being said. IIRC there was
some fuss about vote-stacking in other languages...
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?)
Yes. See [[Special:Preferences]]. I've got accounts (and have edited on)
the French, German, Italian and Polish Wikipedias (doing image
replacement mostly), even though I have no understanding of Italian or
Polish, and can barely remember a few words of French and German from
school.
* it's hard to know what to put as an edit summary
- do you just leave
it in English?
Babelfish? :)
* 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.
Different social customs as well.
* no single login ;)
They're working on it ;-)
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.
Learning other languages would be a good start. I find it extremely
distasteful that native English speakers (especially certain people from
a country which shall not be named) expect that everyone speaks their
language, and worse, their particular version of it.
--
Alphax -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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