[WikiEN-l] Cultural distinctions are accidental? Consensus among cultures is bad?

Thu Jun 8 00:15:53 UTC 2006

On 6/7/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT
> > think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias
> > are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were
> > possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot
> > imagine that we would want to do so.
> >
>
> This seems like a strange position to me.
>
It doesn't make any sense to me either, and it seems to directly
contradict this exchange:

Mark Williamson wrote:
> Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for different
> cultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existing
> Wikipedias considered in this capacity?

Jimbo responded:
> In general, no, but there are many complications of course relating to
> ISO language codes, dialects, languages, etc.

Anthere responded:
> Imho, it is not acceptable at all.
> We try to reach people in their mother language or at least a language
> they handle very well, but we should not provide different content based
> on any other specificity such as nationality, religion, political view point
> and such. By definition, since we try to stick to neutrality, the content provided
> should fit all.

Angela responded:
> No it isn't. I agree with what Jimmy, Anthere, and others have already
> written in reply to this.

Jimbo claims he's said this many times in the past.  I couldn't find
any, but if anyone else can maybe I can better understand what he's
saying.  If Jimbo does "NOT think that cultural distinctions between
difference language Wikipedias are accidental", then he must think
they're intentional.  That raises the question as to who intended
these distinctions, and what distinctions were intended.  I always
thought the English Wikipedia at least was supposed to be neutral with
regard to culture.  Maybe English is the exception?

Jimbo also writes "Anyway, if we were going to use a constructed
meta-language, obviously it would be Klingon or Toki Pona. ;-)"  This
presumably was a response to "Yes, the original plan was to write all
articles in Esperanto and then have them autotranslated to all the
other languages of the world."  This might point to some of the
confusion, as my statement had NOTHING to do with constructed
languages.  I was thinking more along the lines of Wikipedia after the
invention of the [[babel fish]].

If everyone in the world could write to everyone else in the world and
be understood, would there still be a need for multiple language
Wikipedias?  Is Jimbo saying that yes, there would?  If so, I'd LOVE
to see some of the "many times in the past" he's talked about this,
because it makes absolutely no sense.

Anthony