[Wikipedia-l] Non-English Wikipedias surpass English version

Sun Oct 12 08:27:51 UTC 2003

From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Non-English Wikipedias surpass
English version

>Very exciting news at:

>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_News

>I've made some changes to the press release to
reflect >this and also the fact 
>that we missed the 300,000 milestone.

>There were some complaints that "one third of a
>million" and "1/3 million" do 
>not translate well, so I created an alternate
headline >and intro (the  headline is the same as the
subject >line of this email).

>Diff showing change:

>http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikimedia%27s_first_press_release&diff=0&oldid=18697

>Updates to all different versions of the press
release >will be needed. 

This is very thougthful of you Mav, and I appreciate
it.

I would like to say however, that presumably, this
won't be a very good title for most international
wikipedias.

See...perhaps the media that which you will send the
release already know Wikipedia, and know it is growing
fast, so it make sense to insist on another point,
perhaps the setting of the foundation, perhaps the
fact it is multilingue

This is different for some of us perhaps. Our medias
have never heard of the project. So, I think they will
not be very sensible to the fact we are bigger than
the english version since they do not know anything of
the english version itself. Similarly, I would not put
up a title about the foundation or the donation stuff
in a french media, since apparently, french donations
do not work. Or I would not talk of a foundation
setting, since they just do not know the project.

At this point, I think international wikipedias
(perhaps not all of them, that may depend on previous
release of course) would more benefit to insist on the
size of the project (and use the number of pages in
other languages to make it appear real huge :-)).

That is just a suggestion. I think I will stick to
"Wikipedia : more than 300 000 pages" (of course, as
usual french speaking can scream if they disagree :-))

Otherwise, I am purely delighted by the news our
technical problems will likely soon be over :-)

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