[WikiEN-l] Re: Audience

Tue Jan 13 19:55:09 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer a écrit:
> 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. 

Right now, the internet is dominated by native english people. Mostly 
americans. But that will change. Soon, most europeans will be connected. 
And later asian people. And later african people.
I think a good deal of them will speak english. And if Wikipedia is 
successful, many of them will read the english wikipedia.
The audience that is occurring right now, is likely not the audience we 
will have in 10 years.
I suspect that right now, if developpers checked, they would find that 
95% of the hits the english wikipedia gets are from north america. I 
also suspect that it won't be so true in 10 years.

> 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. 

No, you did not understand me. I never said that a picture of a 
circumsised penis was *wrong* there.

*I said it should not be seen as the FIRST picture, as if it was nearly 
the natural condition of it. There should be FIRST a paragraph 
describing what a penis is, what it is in its natural state. The state 
of a penis as it is created by normal development of a human. It could 
be the anatomic paragraph, and truely, a schematic drawing would be best 
here. For neutrality, as well as accuracy and detail.

*Then BELOW, in another paragraph, there could be a detailed description 
of the fact all sort of penis can be found around us. Black, white, 
long, big, circumsised etc...whatever. There, you may put more on the 
circumsision stuff than there are in other languages perhaps.

It is not correct that for cultural proeminence, the anatomy of a penis 
is described differently in one encyclopedia and another. The anatomy of 
a penis is just the same everywhere, on every human. That is what is 
common to all men. It is nature we are describing. We should first 
describing what we all have in common (well, not me naturally :-))

Then, in a second time, we give details, of what is different among 
them. How we differ.

The second point I raised, is that it is POV to label a regular penis, 
as using a comparison with a *specific* state, created by *cultural* 
background.

Imagine an article on [[woman]], where at the top of the page there are 
two women, one naked, and the other one entirely covered by a burka.

Would you describe the picture of the naked woman by saying it is a "a 
woman not wearing a burka"; or would you say it is "a woman".

I guess you would say a woman. There is nothing cultural here. It is 
just description. There is no use of being opposing a natural state with 
a culturally biased state. That is confusing two types of description.

> 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

Definitly we will have to conclude that we disagree Mav :-)

I know my audience, you know your audience.
So we both will select information that will be most useful for our 
audience, as we define it.
And we will both organise it the way we think it best for our audience, 
as we define it.
And as long as we disagree on the content and the organisation, we will 
have to talk about it :-)
That is all there is to say :-)