[WikiEN-l] Re: Audience

Tue Jan 13 18:52:34 UTC 2004

Anthere wrote:
>I agree. That is why we do need to present the penis with 
>which a baby born and grew up, if not modified, as a "penis".
>Not as an "uncircumsed penis".

Uh, no. If and when the article [[penis]] gets large enough, then it will make 
sense to have more photos. One of those photos will be one of an circumcised 
penis. Given that circumcision is relatively common among English readers 
(our audience) we can expect to have - naturally - a relatively large section 
at [[penis]] about circumcision. 

I'm sure that in languages other than English in which circumcision is much 
rarer, that there may never be a whole section in their [[penis]] article 
about that - just a sentence or two and a link in their section dealing with 
all penis modifications. 

Having more than that may bore an audience where circumcision is not as common 
- that sub-topic isn't really as relevant to the the subject for them as it 
would be to readers for whom circumcision is more common. So just because it 
makes sense to you as a non-native speaker that a photo of a circumcised 
penis is not really very relevant to the penis article, please do not think 
that that would make sense to a native speaker. 

Relevance is a relative thing. So know your audience and select information 
that is most useful to them and organize it accordingly. That is going to be 
different in different languages (even when NPOV is followed faithfully). But 
again this happens naturally on Wikipedia due to the fact that the different 
language versions give each language the opportunity to develop articles that 
are most useful to their readers. 

-- mav