Re: <nettime> shocklogs wikipedia entry

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On Wednesday, 7. February 2007 16:33, Geert Lovink wrote:

> What is kind of amazing is the Anglo-Saxon language policing, which
> term is and is not 'proper' English. An (English) wikipedia entry
> cannot be valid if it based on 'foreign language' sources.... now about
> that? Wikipedia is not a dictionary and in fact there are many
> Englishes so it makes you wonder why in particular 'neologisms' are
> targetted. and not names of (famous) persons, as Pit Schulz mentioned.

I think the case against neologism is pretty strong in an             
encyclopedia which aims to document the state of established factual  
knowledge, rather than advance it.                                    

The case against using exclusively non-english sources is pretty
strong, too. Wikipedia, as a whole, is a global project, whereas the
English Wikipedia is, well, an English-language project. Sure, there
are many Englishes these days, but these are, still, Englishes. I
don't think anyone at en.wikipedia would object to a source, or even
an article, written in Indian English, or Jamaican English, or in an
global ESL English. For the sake of transparency en.wikipedia relies
on English-language sources. I mean, I don't read Dutch, so there is
no way for me to check if these sources are relevant. I would not call
this 'language policing'.

I'm pretty sure there is a Dutch-language version of Wikipedia (I
never checked and I'm offline right now) where using Dutch-only
sources is perfectly valid (I guess).

Felix





--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now:
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 




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