On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:33:35 +1100, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: As a contributor to the Anglo-Saxon wikipedia, I appreciate the point that ang: is to some extent a playground for enthusiasts. There are no native speakers of Old English left, so nobody would go to ang: simply for information, unless it be information about the language. This is particularly true since a fair bit (but certainly not all) of ang: is translated from other wikipedias. Yet to Pablo Saratxaga's point that there must be a real will to write an encyclopedia: I have never witnessed any desire on ang: to limit it to writing about Anglo-Saxon culture or people. We have nontrivial articles on scuba diving, number theory, and the Three Kingdoms of Korea. (We haven't quite gotten to chemistry or Russian literature yet.) As for POV, I haven't seen any notable POV issues yet, probably because the user base isn't large and the effort is more on growing the encylopedia. Probably we do give slightly more weight to Anglo-Saxon topics than most wikipedias with 267 articles: it's easier, as the relevant terminology already exists and doesn't need to be coined. But I have never seen any systematic preference for such topics, or any idea that we ought to pretend it is 1066 and we are addressing Anglo-Saxons. For obvious reasons we contributors to ang: are somewhat dependent on the goodwill of the greater Wikipedia community in having an encyclopedia at all. Whether its utility justifies the resources spent on its existence is a matter for the community to determine, but I can attest to the fact that there is will on ang: to create a real encyclopedia. Steve