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.
They are probably both right. At a deep level all the differences are
accidental, but that's not a reason to be compulsive about harmonizing
them. In one sense too Wikipedia can be seen as a lens that converges
all knowledge at the top of the Tower of Babel, but I doubt if that
approach has any practical value, except perhaps in the minds of
techno-geek Vulcans who believe that there is a logical computer
solution for every possible problem.. So I do believe that the
differences are accidental, but I see that as a good dynamic. Viewed
separately the Wikipedias in different languages are bound to arrive at
different NPOVs that are each strongly rooted in distinct cultural
values. A language with a small concentrated geographical territory is
more likely to achieve a satisfactory NPOV, without the complicated
arguments that may be encountered with a widely dispersed language like
English. This broad range of neutralities helps keep things dynamic.
Ec