[Wikipedia-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has subdomains)

Mon Jul 19 04:11:00 UTC 2004

Daniel-
>> How about a setup like this:
>> de.wikimedia.org
>> en.wikimedia.org
>> fr.wikimedia.org

> Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place
> is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the
> only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and
> Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.

Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come  
together. In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite.  
Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is  
minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English  
language Wikipedia.

You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into  
one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English -  
will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This  
is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will  
continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.

The reality is that because of the language barrier, there *are* different  
communities. Because of national barriers, there *are* different Wikimedia  
interests. And there's no reason why an interesting global policy  
discussion shouldn't be started by people who speak no English whatsoever,  
and then be translated into the main languages if there is a vote.

While I would prefer it if all languages of a project were handled with a  
single database and codebase, this requires quite substantial changes to  
the current code, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And if it  
happens, we can port all the existing wikis over to that new system. But I  
think we should strive for a consistent approach.

Regards,

Erik