[Foundation-l] Re: Personal research grant collaboration request

Sat Jul 31 03:58:21 UTC 2004

>> Referring to demographic survey of Wikipedians

> Would this be a study of only the English Wikipedia or also others?
> Maybe it is also interesting to find out of there are real differences
> between the Wikipedias besides the language.
> [[wikipedia:nl:gebruiker:walter]]

I see no reason why such a survey should be restricted to any one language
wikipedia, other than the practical issue of translation. And I don't think
it would be too hard to get collaborative translation projects going of the
master survey version, on a wikipedia-by-wikipedia basis.

By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs.
"wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for
capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other
languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are
many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one
such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For
instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but
the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun
should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring
to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small
letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.

By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to
any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and
zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big
mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be
www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at
en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest
and the most visited).