Re: I love Wikipedia and KDE, but ..

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Re: I love Wikipedia and KDE, but ..
by Michael on Saturday 05/Apr/2008, @09:42

Full ACK. I don't use the German Wikipedia at all exactly for this reason. The English Wikipedia has LOTS more of additional information on nearly every topic you can think of than the German Wikipedia. This is of course not only due to "delete freaks" but also due to the much more limited amount of people speaking German. The delete freaks add insult to injury though and keep deleting stuff unnnecessarily from a site which already has reduced content in comparison to its "parent".

IMHO the idea to have your local language instead of English for every site is a lost cause in general. It causes unnecessary barriers, making the Internet more and more fragmented and is in stark contrast to the "Inter" in "Internet". German is great for everyday talk between colleagues, friends, family and I like it for its increased flexibility to express something and the many ways you can have fun with words, combine and rearrange them - but do I really want to have äöü-characters in my e-mail-address? Certainly not. Do I really want to find a much more unrelated page in Google? I do not use German Google at all anymore. Just try and search for "gimp" at the German Google and look at the first entry. They can't be serious! The list goes and on and it even gets worse with other countries. Imagine a Chinese friend sending you his new e-mail-address. Ugh.

Lots of great ideas are possibly floating around the internet. Perhaps someone has already posted the solution to a problem you are desperately looking for on the Internet but it's in Japanese or German or Turkish or whatever so it's completely useless - even more - it's invisible to everyone else. I don't think it's a great thing at all.

Related Links

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Re: I love Wikipedia and KDE, but ..
by Arnomane on Sunday 06/Apr/2008, @14:58

Well replace "German Wikipedia" by "I18n" and your message doesn't change. You belong to the group of people that think I am stupid cause I like my Computer talking in German to me and not in English. People that think translations of Computer topics are intrinsically evil cause there exist so many bad translations.

By the way did you know that this "software science thing" which is known in German by the very short and descriptive word "Informatik" (~ computer sciences/information technology...) has no real English equivalent? Strange, hum?

Why can't you be so relaxed on the Internet in case you see a "somewhat funny" German translation? In daily live you also most certainly don't use high standard German but your very local dialect with a very relaxed grammar.

Furthermore there are many people -and certainly not stupid people- that can express themselves much better in their own language. Do you want to silence these people for the sake of your "unified English Internet"? This would be a poor and small Internet. Luckily this is not the case.

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