[WikiEN-l] Re: Audience : was Re: pictures of genetalia

Tue Jan 13 08:45:16 UTC 2004

Anthere wrote:
>I am a representant of your french audience. 
>You could write for me. 

No I can't, since I don't speak French. But since you speak and read English 
you *are* part of the audience I write for when I write in English (just not 
the primary one). 

>I guess we will have both to see that we are not 
>writing for the same audience. As long as you 
>accept that some do not recognise these notions  
>of *primary* and *secondary* as valid, while others 
>do, that is fine. 

This whole discussion was more academic than practical since things naturally 
develop toward what I described unless unnatural force is applied to direct 
things down another path (which does happen for individual articles but on 
the whole it is not a very significant force).  

Those of us who speak more than one language, however, should remember that 
there are different notions of how to organize information in different 
languages. They should therefore not just assume that the way they do things 
in their primary language is necessarily transferable in other languages they 
may know. 

This is one thing that I have learned while working on Wikipedia. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)