[WikiEN-l] Re: pictures of genetalia

Mon Jan 12 07:25:43 UTC 2004

Optim wrote:
>Who decided which is the "primary" and the "secondary
>audience" of the English Wikipedia and when this
>decision took place?

It is called writing to your audience and is an age-old and fundamental 
concept. All it mainly does is instruct us on the focus and the order in 
which we organize information; The cultural expectations on what constitutes 
the proper coverage of a subject is going to be different for different 
cultures and in different languages. 

Even what constitutes an encyclopedia differs by culture and language. Same is 
true for the ordering of actual articles - in one culture some topics 
concerning the subject are more important than they are in another culture. 
So the order in which those topics are discussed in the article may differ. 

All English speakers are the audience of the English Wikipedia, but native 
readers - especially monolingual ones - will expect and need to have 
information organized in a way that is most useful and familiar to them.  
Replace "English" with any other language and the same applies there as well. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)