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List:       wikien-l
Subject:    Re: [WikiEN-l] Category translation
From:       Delirium <delirium () hackish ! org>
Date:       2006-06-07 18:05:22
Message-ID: 44871562.2090600 () hackish ! org
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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

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