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.
My view of a good encyclopedia article is that *any* reasonable person
in the world would find it: 1) informative; and 2) neutral. This should
include non-native speakers of the language, people from outside the
typical "culture" of the language, and even people who can't speak the
language at all who have the article translated for them. On en:, we
make an explicit effort to have it *not* be biased towards Anglosphere
culture, but instead to pull in people who speak English as a second
language (whether well or not) and are generally outside of
"English-speaking culture". This isn't of course 100% successful, but
the *goal* is definitely to make it a global encyclopedia, not an
encyclopedia only for people who are culturally in the English-speaking
world.
-Mark