[WikiEN-l] Re: Discussion on English Wikipedia in languages other than English

Mon Jun 20 13:35:20 UTC 2005

On 6/20/05, Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> If you and I went to another language's
> wiki and started writing comments in only English,
> don't you think there would be objections?

IMO it would all depend on how and why you did it, and how you
responded to comments to your extensive writing in English. The topic
of this list is English Wikipedia: I write about sv:WP below because I
think a comparison adds to the understanding of the complexity of the
subject.

At Swedish WP there are people who do post quite a lot in English on
talk pages. The reason for non-Swedish-speakers to write comments in
English on Swedish Wikipedia could be many: the topic might be
international Wikipedia colloaborations etc, something about the
WikiMedia board elections etc (see Angelas comments previously) but
also sometimes comments regarding article content etc. We have an
editor from Japan who writes about international golf players at
Swedish Wikipedia: I guess  he mainly adds dates for tournaments,
victories and similar, since he doesn't speak Swedish - I haven't
checked, only seen some of the discussions. He discusses a lot on the
talk pages, to be able to use the right words etc. If anything, I
think people find his efforts kind of cute. The non-Swedish-speakers
or poor-Swedish-speakers who edit without discussing - mainly by
exchanging one word for another, or cutting parts of articles away -
are IMO much more of a problem.

We should probably realise, though, that if he and three or four other
guys discussed the golf articles at sv:WP  in Japanese instead of
English, that would be something else.  I guess Swedish is not as bad
as Japanese to the average English speaker, but almost (bork bork).
;-)

To add a small complication, there is a situation where I will
probably always add a comment in Swedish on an en:WP talk page, after
what other stuff I've written in English. This is if I am adressing a
person who I know is from Finland and whose Swedish is good; so good
that it might be his/her first language. Due to history and the
relationship between Finnish and Swedish nations and languages, not
acknowledging I am talking to a fellow Swedish speaker although from
Finland is a bit... if Ifail to do this I feel like a jerk. I don't
ask you to understand the mechanisms behind this, and quite possibly
it is more in me than in them. I just ask you to not let general
encouragement of posting in English at en:WP go so far as to frown on
this kind of small comments; it might make life at English Wikipedia a
bit more complicated for us than you understand.

I am still very much in favour of encouragements of taking the on
topic parts of discussions in English.

/Habj