[Foundation-l] Global rights proposal

Wed Jun 25 22:43:54 UTC 2008

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 1:04 AM, Christiano Moreschi
<moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Oh, but English-only speaking Wikipedians who haven't participated in
>> other projects are in a minority; by their own choice!
>
> John, that's sheer sophistry.

Thank you, I think.  At least my straw men are well built.

> Fact: English-Wikipedia-only people constitute, I am sure, if not the
> majority of Wikimedians then at least the biggest minority.

"English-Wikipedia-only people" is a difficult cohort to convert to a
stat; has anyone done it?

English Wikipedia has 7.4 million users.  The next 20 Wikipedias have
4.2 millions users between them. [1]  Two factors that need to be
factored in: most non-English Wikipedians have an acount on en.WP;
most English-Wikipedia-only people have accounts on the other
Wikipedia.  SUL will help to arrive at numbers.

Anyway, determining that the "English-Wikipedia-only people" block is
a majority or biggest minority doesnt help, even if it is true.
Everyone knows that en.WP is the biggest, has the best encyclopedia
articles...

> Quite apart from the fact that en is what the world actually reads.

... but ... Fact: the majority of the world does not have English as
their primary language.

... and ... Fact: there are a _lot_ of Wikimedians who believe that
the Wikimedia Foundation is not about creating a brilliant
encyclopedia in English.

> It's just stupid to give the Albanian Wikispecies the same clout as en.

There is no such thing.[2]

> The en community deserves its voting block:
> there is no good reason to limit the powers of said block.

The last vote was conducted as "one person one vote" and it was an
appalling displaying of uninformed English Wikipedians riding rough
shot over the rest of the community.  Brute force.

1. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#100_000.2B_articles
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix

--
John