I actually think that what is being discussed is a wrong division. Let me give my point of view, which I have discussed on several occasions with kv75, a ru.wp admin. We can roughly divide all content of Wikipedia (I am less familiar with other projects) into three big groups. Let us call them "pop-content", "common-knowledge content" and "expert content".
"Common knowledge" is a collection of topics a person with some education has something to say about. Those include biographies, history, geography, movies, books etc. I guess this is what most of the posters in this thread have in mind. And here we indeed need many languagues, since, for instance, an article on a certain book of Agnon is best written frist by a Hebrew speaker, and eventually translated into different languages, and supplemented by an info on various traslations. This clearly helps to spread the knowledge among people speaking different languages. And in this context, "fails" means just an inactive project, with no editors able to build up this kind of content. It does not mean that say in a year such editors would appear. "Pop" is the information on the subjects like computer games, animation series ets. It is sometimes considered to be of low-level, but we should remember that 90% of our editors (and may be also readers) are only interested in this type of information. And the hope is that they initially get attracted by this type of articles but eventually get grown up and start also contributiong to the articles on other subjects. Also, most of them only speak their mothertongue, especially those active in bigger-language (say with more than 1M speakers) projects. Finally, "Expert" are the articles which can only be contributed by editors having special education: science, some humanities, some social sciences. I am a university professor in physics, and I can indeed confirm what has been previously written (by geni?) that in physics everything (well, almost everything) is published in English, all conferences are in English, and those who do not speak English can not effectively compete. But the "expert articles" are in a pitiful state, even on en.wp! This means that in this direction so far we failed as the whole project. Not 80%, but 100% failed. And indeed I believe that here the best articles should be created on en.wp and eventually get translated (if it is at all possible, for instance, in Russian the notions invented after 1990s may just not exist, I am not sure), but the main problem here is not the language communication but the lack of competent editors creating such content in the first place. Cheers Yaroslav > There are 732 editable wikis on Wikimedia and nearly all of them are > active in some way. Just a year ago, these wikis were getting hit by > loads of spambots and malbots and barely any community to fight them, > but since then we have seen changes in smaller wikis. Apart from maybe > 15-20 wikis, I can safely say that most wikis are active and as Jimbo > mentioned somewhere, it will be good to learn another language as your > second tongue, preferably those that are spoken a lot more.We spend so > much time on these language wikipedias, we should atleast try to learn > something from it :) _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
