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

Thu Jun 8 12:34:35 UTC 2006

Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> My point, however, is that anyone who thinks that such an achievement
> (the ability to effectively communicate among the 112 languages of
> which Wikipedia is considered "somewhat active") would not be useful
> to Wikipedia - they certainly have a completely different idea of the
> project than I do.  I see it as significant that Wikipedia is
> generally referred to as *an* encyclopedia in multiple languages, not
> a collection of encyclopedias in multiple languages.  I thought it was
> significant that Jimbo called Wikipedia "an effort to create and
> distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible
> quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."
> But now he seems to be implying that it wasn't (I still think maybe he
> misinterpreted me, though).

Because obviously, it is impossible that Anthony could have
misinterpreted me.  :)

For what is it worth, I think that questions of language and culture are
subtle and deep.  Perfect machine translation would of course be useful
-- only Anthony could manage to find the straw man argument that anyone
who thinks that language distinctions are important and relevant might
also think that machine translation would not be _useful_.

I think we sit somewhere around 4 on Steve Bennett's scale, but moreso,
I think that is about where we ought to sit, perfect machine translation
or not.

--Jimbo

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