[WikiEN-l] No forks! (was: Re: Print edition)

Sat Feb 28 09:09:04 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>>Why not make it equivalent to a language Wikipedia? 
>>We already have the 'Simple English' Wikipedia. The 
>>other language type link on an article could tell you 
>>the page had been selected (or moved).   
>>
>
>No offense, but this is a horrendously bad idea. We should instead focus on
>adding a good category system and on writing articles in news style so that the
>first section of each article is a concise article in its own right (I call
>this the 'lead section'). 
>
And who is going to have the time to verify that all the chosen articles 
are written in "news style"?  Even if we limit ourselves to a mere 
10,000 srticles it will be a horrendous task.

>I also think that Simple was a bad idea as well since the lead section can and
>should be written in language that can be understood by an average person - no
>special knowledge of the subject area should be required to understand the lead
>section. 
>
I'm no great fan of the Simple project, but I have no incentive to 
bother them in whatever they are doing.  Keeping the language simple is 
easier said than done.  It's a fine ideal, but I can forsee a lot of 
arguments over whether this or that has been put in simple terms.

Ec