Comment by qsort | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qsort | Hacker News Reader

in re English wiki vs. other wikis:

IME most people default to en.wiki unless they are looking for something very specific that the English language version doesn't cover. It's not surprising en.wiki gets the most attention, it's the one people actually use.

For instance, I remember university professors routinely saying to never look up stuff on, in my case, it.wiki. That's good advice, as far as I'm concerned.

> He imagines a future in which the human editors of Abstract Wikipedia are not only writing functions using computer code, but are also able to communicate with one another via that code.

vaste programme

> “All of those examples [of universal languages] are failures, all of them didn’t work out,” Vrandečic told me. “So why do we think we have a chance? [Because] we’re creating a framework where we have thousands of people working on this problem, not just a single person or some very small group [...]”

He's completely wrong about the reason. Code as a language doesn't work out because the apparent correspondence between the two is in fact only superficial. Natural language is not formal, it doesn't attempt to be formal, and it doesn't need to be formal. I don't think adding more people is going to solve any of that.

>IME most people default to en.wiki unless they are looking for something very specific that the English language version doesn't cover. It's not surprising en.wiki gets the most attention, it's the one people actually use.

That's a pretty wrong generalization. It depends on the country, whether they speak English well enough and if their national wikipedia is big enough (Scandinavian countries, maybe?). In Russia, for example, almost no one reads the English version. I assume it's the case in France as well. Also I've seen friends of mine from Germany exchange mostly German wiki links between themselves.

This isn't something where we need to rely on experience, we can just look it up. E.g. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org vs https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/it.wikipedia.org vs https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/de.wikipedia.org

Yes, those numbers are quite convincing, the national language ones are more popular in their respective countries.

I guess the 'most people' part of my claim was wrong.

People in France or Japan or most other countries don’t default to the English language version of Wikipedia.

I can confirm for France, the French edition of Wikipedia is usually good, especially for science-related topics and local things.

I would say it's the case if the information in their primary language is sufficient (and even if it's not, there may be other sites). I defaulted to enwiki as it provides more information and less attempt to control the narrative structure of the same article in my primary language (YMMV on the latter, though)

Its crazy how different languages on the same article can have completely different tones and give a different idea of the subject even when they fundamentally have the same facts listed.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted, this is a straight fact. The amount of political bullshit in an article is inversely proportional to the number of contributors, and in most cases the English version has more editors.

For exactly the same reason en.wiki is more likely to be correct on scientific and technical subjects.

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