[WikiEN-l] Audience

Mon Jan 12 23:29:04 UTC 2004

Since some people will undoubtedly not have read what I said in my posts 
previous to the last one, let me clarify:

Different languages often have different traditions on how to best organize 
information. This means that what passes for a great article in one language 
will not necessarily translate very well into another language (meaning, it 
would probably not be viewed as being great and may in fact be viewed as 
being poor - even when it is translated well). 

Things like dictionaries, encyclopedia, newspapers and other media are not 
really the same things across different languages and thus something that 
would be good in one language may not be seen as good if translated as-is 
into another. For example, what constitutes a textbook - the type of thing 
that it *is* - has a different tradition in different languages. Sometimes 
that tradition is fairly uniform between two languages, sometimes it is very 
different. 

This is why having editorially independent Wikipedia versions in many 
different languages is a such a great thing. A mere translation of the 
English Wikipedia, for example, would not meet the expectations of what an 
encyclopedia *is* (the way it should cover topics) by many non-English 
speaking people. An *encyclopedia* is really a different thing in different 
language traditions. 

*That* is what I am talking about when I say that we have primary audiences 
(those whose native language is one we are writing in) and secondary 
audiences (those whose native language is something other than the language 
we are writing in but who still speak in the language we are writing in). It 
would be internal balkanization to allow the traditions of one language to be 
used in an encyclopedia in another language.  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)