Talk:Saskia Sassen/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Pls continue the Bibliography discussion here, but if you do that let us see a (small) note about it on the main S.Sassen Talk page where most of us hang out. I also may prune some of my own postings here, to get this page below minimum size for now. --Kessler 00:48, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Bibliography

So far, I considered myself as something of an inclusionist about bibliographies. But looking at this one makes me wonder if it isn't too much of a good thing... Sassen published some works which have had quite an impact, but she is also publishing a lot. By now it looks like the key titles oen the list are drowning in stuff of less relevance, to a point where, at least for the unitiated, usability is at stake. To make it worse still, the list is bloated with titles in other languages. Shouldn't we better stick to original book publications, i.e. exclude translations, as well as minor articles, conference papers, video recordings (!) etc.? Also, if dozens of papers and articles are available from an external site, wouldn't it be enough to include an (appropriately commented) link to that site? --Thorsten1 23:39, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Well... The point about Sassen is what she writes -- and says, to some extent, as I've tried to throw in a few online-available radio addresses easily accessible to Wikipedia people -- but primarily she's a writer. So "inclusion" favors bibliography, I think, in her case: the more the better, if it is interesting +/or important to read. This said, yes, she has written a lot: but then I've left a lot out, and tried to tag the most important works with that "!" indicator -- if you spot something you think needs eliminating pls let me know? I've tried to hit the breadth of her thinking on vital current issues, but she does seem to be at the center of all of them. I'll change the section to "Resource List" to cover radio & video etc.: those are important -- it's a multimedia world.

On your point about "other languages", though... Wikipedia rapidly is becoming the only entry-point for an awful lot of people, around the planet, who have no other: either because they don't have the time, for others, or because they really don't have them. So if it ain't in "Wikipedia (English)", it ain't there... I'd like to include at least a few of the "other language" translations: that's what I have done here -- it would help if the other Wikipedias were more complete, with Sassen etc. articles, but they aren't, yet -- so I've put in some Italian & Hungarian & Spanish & Japanese etc. translations hoping that rudimentary-English folks will find them here. Sassen's work is becoming the cutting edge in Globalization and Immigration policy and debate now: important stuff, and it badly needs to become available to "other language" folks as well. When Sassen pages start popping up on the "other language" Wikipedias, tho, I'll throw in a link and then trim the bibliography in this one, I promise.

Your external site point -- which site? -- happy to do what you suggest, hadn't noticed that.

--Kessler 01:10, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Just checked the "other language" major Wikipedias and found no Sassen pages so far: none at Magyar (Hungarian), either... :-)

--Kessler 01:18, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Thorsten1: I've interlined replies to your various points, in your posting which follows --

Hello Kessler, thanks for replying. Being the original author of this article and a bibliography inclusionist, I appreciate your commitment to Sassen's work and the huge amount of work you must have put into compiling the bibliography. You are right of course, this still isn't a complete list. With a writer as prolific as Sassen, it is almost impossible to keep up with her output. The other side of the coin is, not every publication contains new ideas.

Very true, on both points. In Sassen's case I would counter, as to your last, that any good idea is worth considering from several different angles and so is worth re-stating, but in the case of other writers yes this can become a defense for lack of originality. I suppose too that Sassen's ideas strike me as being so important and so timely, now, that they are worth repeating. But... as you say... (more below)

I do not have the leisure to read through all of the many minor items on the list, so I'd be hard pressed to suggest which ones to delete. That said, there's some categories that I would earmark for removal across the board: Interviews or comments in the general press (some of which, such as about Iraq and terrorism, are terribly unoriginal);

I'll remove that one: I put in those Guardian articles & interviews simply to indicate the extraordinary breadth & depth of Sassen's interests & vision, but I suppose that is indicated as well by her general writings.

other people's writing about Sassen, including reviews of her books;

These I think should stay: one of the greatest difficulties of gaining entry to a new subject area or a complicated topic is gaining objectivity on one writer's views -- like you, most folks do not have the time to read the writings of several, on these issues, but a good reviewer can at least introduce them. So I believe responsible book reviews can be indispensable to new readers of Sassen's work, as encyclopedia users tend to be.

forewords and afterwords to other people's books;

I'll remove these. Writers often drop hints as to peripheral areas of their own interests, which they might pursue later, in writing forwards and afterwords -- in Sassen's case this would interest me, so I included them, but others may be more interested only in the Globalization/Immigration/Transnationalism topics-at-hand.

video recordings. Even if this is a multimedia world, it would be nothing without a book ;).

Amen to that, although caveat lector...:-) But...

One special reason for the inclusion of multimedia resources on Wikipedia is that they tend to be more generally available online than print resources are: not video, yet -- although Steve Jobs et al. are working on that -- but radio spots, like the two included here, and other conference etc. presentations. So I really think these ought to be included wherever possible, to boost Wikipedia's "content" percentage. The print world became filled with indexes of indexes or indexes, so much so that generations of graduate students became proficient at nothing more than navigating through those: hopefully the digital world will flatten that particular pyramid a bit, and put users more directly in touch with the content they seek -- dependable online resources will do that.

No matter h:ow many online papers etc. there are, in the humanities, any author's perception by peers and the general audience is still very much determined by their books, which form the cornerstones of their output, and that is what they should appear as in Wikipedia articles.

I disagree. The sciences, and even the social sciences in which Sassen herself works, increasingly are dominated by online resources rather than print: it takes nearly 2 years for an article to appear in Science or Nature or in the standard academic journal, these days -- long after the article's novelty and effectiveness have been exhausted -- in 2 years' time, nowadays via digital email and pre-prints, everyone has read and discussed and forgotten the thing, the promotion has taken place, the prize has been won, etc., etc. Print publication may be validation after the fact, still, but that only -- and increasingly even that minimal function is too expensive, for small-print-run academic journalism.

Whether this ever will be the case in the humanities? Well, I don't know... it depends how you parse the term "humanities"... Does that include rap music and poetry slams? If so, we're already there...

However, in the present state of this "biblio"graphy, these tend to disappear among the rest; even the exclamation marks are not helping that. Renaming the section "Resources", as you suggest, would not resolve this problem but solidify it.

OK, I understand your point: you've made a good suggestion further on, here, which may resolve this...

Instead, I propose to keep online sources separate from printed material. The former can be listed unter the header "External links", which is an accepted practice.

OK, I will restore the "Bibliography" term and include only major printed works there: your suggestion below that an External link to a separate User:Kessler/Sassen page seems to provide a good resolution of all this.

You asked about which external link I was referring to. It is http://transnationalism.uchicago.edu/links.html and was already present in the very first version of the article. It has links to 8 papers, out of which 6 (if I counted correctly) are now also included and linked to in the bibliography.

Yes, that is so. I'll make that into an External link in my revision.

As for the translations, I can see where you are coming from, of course. But I really do not agree that an en.wikipedia article about an author should be a place to deposit bibliographic information about translations of that author's works into language xy for as long as no xy.wikipedia article exists.

The practical problem is that the current multilingual superstructure of Wikipedia -- having one for "French" and another for "Magyar (Hungarian)" and another for "English" and so on -- does not correspond to actual user practice, and does not scale up.

The fact that most users of an online resource such as Wikipedia -- the profile still is wealthy / Western / well-educated / Western-educated / male -- use both "English" and their own "native language", and in many cases several "other languages", for communication. Nearly all can and do read resources in more than one of these languages, regularly and easily. So separating out the various Wikipedias by language is artificial and imposes extra burdens on the users which do not in fact get assumed: most stick with "English" because it is so cumbersome to flip from that to some other Wikipedia and then get back again.

I have found this myself, in trying to use Wikipedias "English" & "French" -- I'm sure you have found it, yourself, in trying to use "English" & "German" -- I still haven't found an easy way to flip back and forth, and so find myself using the far larger and better developed Wikipedia "English" by default. But I can and do read French and Spanish and Italian and bits of other languages, in my work, as many Wikipedia users do. The future of that Wikipedia user demographic will make this situation worse, as well, as that is tied to education: the kids -- women too, now -- attending those enormous & excellent new schools in India and China, all are relentlessly multilingual.

Senseless, then, to park the resources by "language", in places where they will not be seen. Also, this is why the numbers are so skewed, still, for Wikipedia generally: "English 931,000 articles", "German 344,000 articles", "French 228,000 articles", "Spanish 88,000 articles" -- "Magyar (Hungarian)(?)" -- I suggest a large and rapidly-growing proportion of the users of that "English 931,000 articles" Wikipedia in fact are "other language" speakers, now, who simply can't be bothered going to the smaller and less-complete "other language" Wikipedia versions. None of the latter appear to have an article on Sassen yet, remember...

Of course, the hypothetical author of hu:Saskia Sassen might benefit from the information "Elveszített kontroll? szuverenitás a globalizáció korában ([Budapest] : Helikon, 2000) [ford. Rotyis József] [Almási Miklós előszavával] 129 p., 21 cm" (note the book format!).

But it ought to be online digital text! Printed books are expensive, in Hungary... :-)

Seriously, it is important for Wikipedia to try better to reach those Hungarian and additional "other language" readers, better than it is doing so now. Maintaining separate files for different languages makes for endless duplication, and user frustration: far better, I believe, for the main Wikipedia database to welcome multi-lingual access within it -- English and "other languages" -- less data storage, that way, also less user clumsiness and frustration, and it corresponds better with user behavior in an increasingly multilingual world. Those callcenters in Mumbai and Chennai speak better "English" than is spoken in England...

But, as I said, I feel that the sheer amount of such information in the present bibliography is making it unusable. We need to balance the interest of the potential author of hu:Saskia Sassen against the interest of the existing reader of en:Saskia Sassen in usability.

That's an unacceptable choice, to me, Wikipedia needs to "think global": and in terms of resources, the current Wikipedia multilingual superstructure is far more expensive than combining the languages would be -- now we are requiring hundreds of separate articles on a single subject, while just one, available in a few "major" versions and accompanied by bibliography and links to various language resources, would be more economical.

I suppose a Hungarian editor could find this information on the internet as easily as (or possibly more easily than) you have.

Nope. Really tough to find these things... I do it all the time, for "other languages" folks frustrated by their own local systems: Western indexing still is the most comprehensive, and it works the best.

Also, I believe that Wikipedia, in order to fulfil its purpose, should reduce the complexity of the world out there (and that includes bibliographic complexity) instead of mirroring it.

And I maintain that it is a multilingual world out there in the sense that, increasingly, most folks in fact use several languages. The only truly mono-lingual culture of which I am aware, certainly among those currently "online", is that of the US, and even in the US multilingual access is increasing, rapidly.

It's not a question, for Wikipedia, of mirroring the customer, it is one of understanding customer behavior: if the customer uses several languages inter-changeably, but different Wikipedias are set up for each language, then complexity is being increased, not reduced.

Of course, since you already gathered it, it would be a pity to discard such information. But then there's always the user namespace - nobody will object if you store massive amounts of more or less unstructured information on a page like User:Kessler/Sassen. We can put a link to that page here, so the information can be easily retrieved.

OK, this sounds like a good suggestion, and I'll do it: I'll put the current Resource List there, copy the few "major" entries to the "Bibliography" and "External Links" sections in the Sassen article, and place a link to User:Kessler/Sassen in the article. Good compromise for several issues we've discussed here: compliments.

Please do not read my criticsm as destructive. I hope we can find a good compromise. --

Always... life is too short... :-)

Thorsten1 12:08, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

--Kessler 20:59, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Hello Kessler, again, thanks for your reply and revising the bibliography - it is already much easier on the eyes. ;)

The opthalmologists of the world thank us -- the optometrists do not.

For the sake of readability, I will quote and reply to some of your interspersed points down here.

First off, you said "I suppose too that Sassen's ideas strike me as being so important and so timely, now, that they are worth repeating." Let there be no misunderstanding: Personally, I do not mind Sassen publishing as much as she does, although I'm sure there are some scholars who do because they envy her popularity. ;)

Hm, academic chestnut:

"Professional historians do not esteem William Shirer. His historical books are simplistic in interpretation, unbalanced in coverage, superficially researched and full of wrongheaded theories. Worst of all, they sell like crazy."

-- William Sheridan Allen, historian

All I was trying to say is that this bibliography should be more sparing with journal aricles, book chapters, lecture transcripts, occasional pieces, which are probably running into the hundreds.

Several hundred -- 300 and counting, so far... -- I'll let you know the exact total soon.

Since we can't possibly include them all,

Why not? Why not include them all?

One of the greatest benefits of digital technique is its ability to compress & organize & make readily available data which formerly was restricted, in all three respects, by cost and technical limitations. Sure, long ago the idea of "complete" information was unrealizable in nearly any situation: information literally meant "editing". Nowadays, though, incomplete information implies censorship, there being vastly improved technique and rapidly-diminishing cost -- per "Moore's Law" for both -- in data-handling.

So I would say, myself, that it is worth the effort, to try to include them all... Umberto Eco offers a good quote about any effort to do otherwise:

"Who, what authority will decide which books to retain? Plato and Dante have known their periods of disgrace, although they have been able to transcend the centuries..."

we should narrow their list down to the most significant ones.

As just suggested, I would let the users decide, in this case, not make the choices of "significance" ourselves. We are not mounting fulltext, of all of Sassen's work -- although I would applaud that effort too -- but only citations, which do not take up too much digital room. I use webpages daily, now, which occupy 100k and more -- websites, filled with hundreds of same -- so devoting that to a few Sassen citations to me seems a better social investment than the commercial & Infotainment & political websites which offer data-blather in the gigabytes.

Exactly which these are is open to debate, of course, and one I would rather not join myself. Still believe that some sort of selection must be made.

I don't, not of Sassen's citations. All that I have read by her has been very worthwhile, and I wish that I had time to read more. I recommend them highly to all readers, moreover, as the Globalization and Immigration and other issues they address are timely now and are vitally important. The online digital space devoted to these issues by the ill-informed and un-informed are enormous, moreover -- these are very partisan & emotive & important questions, nowadays -- I believe greater space needs to be provided to the relatively dispassionate and scientific, yes "objective" even, presentation of these issues by someone who has done the homework and some thinking, like Sassen, for our encyclopedia / Wikipedia effort: we need it, badly, if our "Digital Commons" is not going to be dominated by the Infotainment and partisan political and commercially-interested parties.

You're worrying over a red herring, in other words: Wikipedia's entire content is dwarfed by the digital presence online in these arenas of actors in them such as Elle magazine, Citicorp, the US and French and other national governments, and the countless commercial firms now making much money building the very Global Cities, and formulating the very Immigration policies, which Sassen describes and analyses. The GOP and the Democratic Party both will spend a lot more on these issues, in their digital efforts of their next US election, than Wikipedia ever has spent in its history. So the small Wikipedia effort now to make Sassen's scientific and contrarian policy views available, in an objective online encyclopedic undertaking, is an important one. But we've resolved that by including only the short list in the article, I think.

Regarding the pieces and comments in the Guardian: I see what you mean, but again, we must draw a line somewhere. Comments on migration are probably acceptable as such, since they refer to her area of expertise, even though I found them to be somewhat superficial by her standards. However, statements such as on Iraq are certainly dispensable.

What "statement about Iraq"? I see only 3 remaining quotations from articles, in the list, all of them making direct links from current events to her sociological theories, and included for that purpose.

There are references to only 5 of her Guardian pieces left in there now: 3 are the sources for the quotes just mentioned -- the other 2 are,

"The new lords of Africa", in The Guardian (UK), July 9, 2003

-- which is a piece about warlordism in Africa, and "The South vs. The North", directly tied to her and others' concerns about the current path of Globalization. The article had significant impact in Britain and on the Continent: it first was pointed out to me by correspondents in France and Italy, and in Africa. Sassen's views qua sociologist on the matter I personally find very interesting:

"...Every time countries of the global south have politically organised to see some of their interests reflected in the WTO declarations, the work of elaborating the details takes a peculiar turn. Sheer power trumps politics."

-- "power relations", in the WTO negotiations, is a point which does not get much consideration in the general press, and Sassen makes it forcefully here. Any academic discussion of the WTO arena would include it -- anyone interested in Sassen, as Wikipedia readers of the article will be, would want to know about it.

Not that I wouldn't agree, but in military affairs, Sassen is as much a layman as anyone else, and her opposition to the war, shared by many millions the world over, does very little to characterise her as a scientist or even a person. Of course, you may disagree. But even if we agreed to include such things, they should rather not appear on par with regular publications.

I am not aware of any publication in which Sassen has held forth her expertise as a military strategist, and I wish you would point that out among these citations or anywhere else. That would diminish my own respect for her, true, but I doubt that she has done so.

Military "affairs", on the other hand, are "a matter too important to be left to generals", in my personal opinion, and one reason why the US for example has a civilian CinC, by constitutional mandate: the US Founders feared generals as much as the rest of us do. So Sassen's views on military affairs, or your own, would be as interesting to me as Secy Rumsfeld's or VP Cheney's or P Bush's or those of any member of the Joint Chiefs: I'd go to that last group for advice on how to win a battle, maybe -- not to the others -- but overall decisions on military policy I still would leave to civilians, as the US always has. Military people have a significant conflict-of-interest, in judging those: Eisenhower, a man who knew well whereof he spoke, pointed that out in his "military-industrial complex" speech, many years ago.

Still, though, Sassen hasn't done this: as far as I am aware even her "military affairs" observations all are tied in to interesting sociological points stemming very directly from her specific professional expertise. Pls let me know if I'm wrong about this, tho, & cite examples?

Generally, there certainly is some case for every single item on the (original) bibliography. My point is that by putting them all in one, chronologically ordered list we are creating too much entropy in the system.

You need to loosen up your "Bibliography" idea a bit, I think: people no longer just read "books"... The Wikipedia readers who look at the Sassen article either a) already will have read some of her work -- she is very widely-read, as we both know -- and will be looking for more, one primary reason for offering that "more" as a resource here, or b) they will have read nothing by Sassen and will want to know the extent, breadth and depth, of her work, which is the point of presenting a thorough bibliography. Merely listing "a few books" is precisely a limitation of the non-digital printed encylopedia world which Wikipedia and the Internet's digital information have been designed to go beyond.

E.g., there is no reason against including multimedia resources. However, they should not be included in the main biography but in external links;

It is not clear to me why, as I've said... You have tried to convince me that "printed books" are the only really respectable information resource, but I have not been convinced: it is a multimedia world, now -- look on any college campus, or high school campus, or any city street, for confirmation. I happen to be a fan of libraries of printed books, but even those libraries rapidly are embracing multimedia now, as quickly as they can. To me the "container" does not matter: if information is more readily conveyed to the user in a digital format, or online, or in a printed book, or in a "movie"... or in the carvings and bright multi-colored paintings on a medieval church facade, cf. V.Hugo's "ceci tuera cela"... then so be it, we should accept that and refer interested users to such sources. Restricting "information" delivery to one media format simply restricts the information.

if they are not available online, I would seriously question their usefulness to anyone but diehard Sassenians (I don't know if there even are any yet ;).

Not the point... Wikipedia has global reach, delivering information to people now in Africa and Asia and Latin America, which not only are impoverished places very often but also are located in the tropics. Paper books are expensive, in developing countries, and in the tropics they rot. Information carried on other media isn't and doesn't: a kid on a flipfone can read text and view images, in hot & steamy backwoods Nigeria etc., while she might never see the same on paper.

Quite the same goes for reviews by other people. Yes, they can be instructive - but unless they are really brilliant, easily available on the internet (read: free of charge), or preferrably both, I'd say they are just bloating the article. Likewise, they should not be in the main bibliography, but in a separate section.

I disagree: brilliance is not the point of a review but difference -- the entire point of reading a review is to get a different slant on the author's text -- some context including background and competing ideas and where to go for alternatives, as well as evaluation. Authorial intent has no monopoly on truth: the purpose of critical thinking, nowadays but also long before the recent rage for same, has been to develop a reader's own capacity for working with the ideas -- depth and breadth -- that is why they read reviews, to expand what they just have read in the text under review. Also why the review citation needs to be near the text citation, visually, in the list: separate them out and they'll just get ignored -- offering them together is part of the process of getting the reader interested and personally-engaged in the author's discussion.

Coming back to online resources stuff in general. I agree that these are becoming increasingly important also in the "humanities". Speaking of which, sociology has traditionally been a discipline at the intersection of the humanities and exact science. And while Sassen's work is based on empirical ground work, what she has become famous for are the conclusions and theorizing.

A suggestion leveled often against sociologists, and anthropologists, and economists, and political scientists, and all social scientists... a price they pay, heavily at times, for having embraced Comte and declared themselves to be "scientists"... the dismal science for instance once was called "political economy", and I believe was more happily-labeled, and more accurately, for that...

But Sassen to me seems more careful than most. As you point out, her conclusions and theorizing are empirically-based, unlike the wild speculations of many others in her various disciplines. I have read all of her books, as they have come out, and many of her essays, and can attest -- plenty of numbers in there -- and her professional history appears to have involved plenty of field-work, or so the bibliographic record seems to indicate. That's one reason why I put some of that obscure early & academic work in the list, for validation purposes... :-)

This is still the domain of books - if you check the citation frequency for her work, I am quite sure you will find that The Global City or Globalization and its discontents are far more frequently referred to than any of the online articles.

Which is only one reason why citation frequency is a misleading statistic... Yes, of course, plenty of citations to Sassen's two major works pop up in the press, academic and other: any simplesearch library OPAC scan can produce such "bibliography" -- no indicator whatsoever of relevance to the text to which it is attached, or that the writer in fact has read the resource -- high school "bibliographies" get this all the time, sometimes attaching them to downloaded canned texts even, and college & university level does the same increasingly now. One more reason why Wikipedia shouldn't... As an entirely new sort of resource, Wikipedia needs an entirely new sort of "bibliography" -- one which takes full advantage of Wikipedia's innovative digital format and structure, and digital techniques, and doesn't slavishly follow older bibliographic norms -- a "Resource List", multilingual & multimedia & with lots of images & links, as I've tried to suggest to you. A "short list of best-selling printed books", which nowadays folks get mostly from Amazon.com, doesn't add much to a Wikipedia's user's knowledge about "Saskia Sassen", which after all is the subject of the article.

That's why I believe these books should be given a more prominent position in the bibliography than the online articles.

I don't. I want them to read what Sassen has written, not just note how famous she is. By providing easily-used links to easily-read Guardian and other online texts we are encouraging Wikipedia readers to get into her ideas...

I'm afraid you got me wrong on this point: Having stuff "at your fingertips" is great, after all it is one of the huge benefits of the internet age. However, authors still tend to have their most significant works printed and sold at a profit (or not), instead of making them available on the internet for free.

And any time somebody tells you, "It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing!", it's the money... :-)

Online resources simply do not have the same impact as printed books yet.

Not so. The impact of online resources is far greater -- already, and substantially -- than that of printed books. It depends what "impact" you are considering...

If impact in terms of academic in-house discussion is your important factor, then yes printed books still hold sway: I know quite a few folks in the academic disciplines -- "in the club" -- who read one another's printed works, regularly and meticulously, exchange thoughts and approving or disapproving nods about them, and so on.

Not in the physical sciences, though: there "currency" is paramount, and they don't wait for "print", any longer -- they can't, as we discussed earlier here -- 2 years' lead-time, for standard academic print publishing, makes information thoroughly dead-letter, in the physical sciences nowadays -- they're all about email and digital pre-prints, now... if not real-time 24/7 data transfer, to which cutting-edge fields like biotech and computer science have migrated...

Nor in math, nor in professional schools -- ask law students about Lexis, or medical students about Medline, and about the many online resources in both cases -- also grad business students -- "who has time to read?", normally is the response, and as for reading "books?"...

Not a good situation, in my own opinion, but definitely the situation -- far worse / better when all these folks get out into practice, too -- think of biotech researchers, computer scientists, lawyers, doctors, Fortune 500 business dealmakers -- "who has time to read?", with a vengeance. It's why the publishing industries have bifurcated, now: it's either low-end mass market pulp fiction, printed in the hundreds of thousands, or expensive / Kodansha coffeetable-books, printed in the hundreds and autographed and sold for astronomical prices -- anything with print-runs in the mere thousands, like academic or professional print publishing, is falling through the gap and disappearing.

But perhaps you are thinking of the social sciences... or of the humanities... Yes the printed book will have a "market", well into the future, but it will be a limited one... Sociologists and anthropologists and political scientists still read printed books -- when they are not glued-to-the-tube doing email and revising joint-author submissions in real-time and teaching online distance learning classes -- and poets still read books, the poets not enraptured by hip-hop lyrics and online "slams", that is... Brave New World... yechhh, perhaps, but we're there...

Finally, I'm not sure I'm getting what you mean by the "current multilingual superstructure of Wikipedia" and what the problem is supposed to be.

The current structure is a different Wikipedia for each different major human language: Wikipedia (English) and Wikipedia (German) and Wikipedia (French) and so on.

The problems are at least four: others I'm sure can add to this list --

1) duplication -- a different "Sassen" article in each;

2) cross-referencing -- the difficulty of flipping back and forth among the different language versions -- Wikipedia might benefit from adding (automated) internal links, i.e. any time a "Chirac" article appears in en, or hu, add reciprocal links, plus one for each to the article in fr and vice versa there too;

3) scale -- Unicode counted over 6000 human languages in current use -- and that using fairly restrictive definitions tied to character code depiction -- looser definition, and the inclusion of spoken and pictorial and other non-charactercode-amenable communication, would have yielded many more -- and it all changes, constantly... any multi-lingual approach tied too rigidly to current practice will not scale up... -- "reciprocal links" (above) might help here too;

4) user behavior -- many folks know more than one language, and Globalization is increasing this proportion -- anyone "Indian" or "Chinese" already knows several, and that is 1/3 of the world right there... -- so they'll increasingly want resources in different languages, not just one-size-fits-all English.

Of course, there are many alternative ways in which the wikipedias in various languages could be organized, and some of them would probably be better - but I think the current interface is already pretty straightforward.

I like the interface, but I don't like the data structure: hampers the functionality.

I find it amazing that some language versions are so dramatically underdeveloped, too.

Sociological & political & economic explanations for this phenomenon abound... those "social sciences", again... :-)

It's true that en.wikipedia, being the largest, benefits from the fact that many non-native speakers of English prefer to contribute here rather than at their respective "home" wikipedias - this is the Matthew effect at work.

The way I first heard that one was, "The rich get richer and the poor get children" -- which underlies the irony, and dynamism, in the supposed conundrum -- when those kids grow up they want to be rich.

It also owes a lot to English being the global lingual franca.

French was, once -- ask the French about that -- and Latin was once, too.

But what are we supposed to do about it?

"Learn Chinese!" -- lyric from a very old and still very funny & topical Tom Lehrer song... A billion+ Chinese can't be wrong: and right now they're growing their economy at nearly 10% per annum -- by 2012 they'll be richer than the EU, and by 2015 than the US ("straightline extrapolation at current rates", etc., etc.) -- so by 2050 they'll be the "customers", and "the customer is King", and when you're selling to a guy, and you owe him money, and he no longer needs you, you learn to speak his language... just ask Google, this week...

Including all kinds of information in many different languages in one article is not a viable solution. Most users of en.wikipedia speak one language apart from English. All information that is not either in English, or in the language that happens to be one's native tongue, is just noise out of which one has to filter the meaningful signal.

Human language is not signalling. Language is about semantics and syntactics and context -- and proxemics and several hundred other factors -- a very supple and protean tool for engineering that "meaningful" term you just used. Try translating French poetry in to English, then in to German and Tibetan and Tagalog -- and then do the reverse, and see what comes back.

One of the most famous old saws of machine translation was of the attempt which fed in, "The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak", which the system rendered into German, then re-translated that back into English and spat out, "The whiskey was good but the meat was bad".

The more languages there are, the more laborious this gets. And I haven't even mentioned those who do not read English at all and would have their "home" wikipedias taken away from them and merged into some multilingual mess dominated by English contents. Well, in short, that's why I suggest to exclude translations from the main list.

But all these are reasons for making the effort, not against it -- they are why we're here. Wikipedia's entire purpose is to enhance and increase human communication -- sure, it's laborious -- but if we insist that everyone talk, by practical default (as you point out) or otherwise, in our own language we are cutting off most of the human race. Folks out there really do not all speak English and, perhaps more importantly, even if they do they'd rather speak their own language: "customer is King" -- to scale up to the globalized and international / trans-national world, which Sassen describes for us so thoroughly and adequately, any tool such as the Internet, or application such as Wikipedia, is going to have to talk those "other languages", and talk them well. So I'd in-clude translations and other multilingual resources, for the very reasons you suggest, not ex-clude them...

Back in 1989, at Berkeley, a very young and little-traveled Internet developer-genius, shoes propped on desk & baseball cap on backwards & chewing-gum wad in mouth, stuttered to me incredulously, "B-but all those 'foreigners' overseas really do speak English, don't they?" I told him, "No, they don't." Finally we're having to face that.

Basically, my point is more about structure than about contents itself. I think if we built a section like this, we could get a bibliography that is both comprehensive and usable:

 1 Bibliography
 1.1 books
 1.1.1 authored books
 1.1.2 edited books
 1.2 Book chapters, articles 
 1.3 manuscripts, working papers
 2 Other resources
 2.1 manuscripts, working papers
 2.2 recordings, transcripts, interviews etc.
 3 relevant third-party publications on Sassen 
 4 External links - internet-only resources not included above

I've built in a couple of categories to the larger list, and will add same to the article Bibliography. The list still needs to be chronological, I think, as the point here is to understand the development of Sassen's ideas, rather than differences between media -- little interest in fine distinctions such as "articles" vs "working papers" vs "manuscripts". But yes I can see that subdivisions within the chronology might be useful and I will add those.

Of course, this is just the result of a brief brainstorming to give you an idea of what I mean. Unfortunately, I'm leaving tomorrow morning and won't have a permanent internet connection until Tuesday, so I won't be able to discuss this further or edit the article until then.

Have a good time, wherever on the planet you have found a place to escape from wifi... I have neighbors who are convinced that it causes cancer, that we are cooking ourselves with all that tissue-excitation... our remedy at home is to have no TV, and to unplug the fone...

There's no hurry, anyway... --Thorsten1 22:47, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Never -- go placidly amid the noise and haste -- as per various interesting folks including[http://www.longnow.org] (nice clock)

--Kessler 20:06, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm afraid I can't comment on every single point - there already is an article size warning above the edit box.... It seems you have a penchant for abundance not only about bibliographies, but also when it comes to debating them... :-) So let me mention just a few points. You asked what statement about Iraq I was referring to. It was this statement in The Guardian. You are right, it was already gone from the list by the time I was mentioning it. I mentioned it anyway, because it is a good illustration of what I meant.

About the categories within the bibliography: I agree that the distinction between articles and working papers is probably too fine. But if you look at the resumes of scholars, you'll notice how most of them organize their auto-bibliographies in at least two categories - books and "non-books" (articles, chapters in books edited by others, working papers etc.). If the bibliography comprises just a few items, even this may not be really necessary; but the more somebody has published, the more sense there is in ever finer distinctions. A chronological bibliography is not really that helpful for understanding the development of an author's ideas - not least because there can be long delays between submittal and publication, as you pointed out yourself. Ultimately, the development of Sassen's ideas should be outlined in the main part of the article, rather than being left to be inferred from the bibliography.

You asked why we shouldn't be able to include all of Sassen's writings here, of which you said there were 300 or more. You misunderstood me there - of course this is not a technical problem. Rather, the problem is that it is quite difficult to keep up with new publications and track down everything ever published in any language.

Finally, I still don't get your problem with WP's multilingual "superstructure". What's so wrong with having a separate article in every language? How can articles cater for various (possibly hundreds?) of languages at the same time without becoming utterly confusing for those who speak just one language (or a few others)? All I can say at the moment is that your method of multilingual "See also" links ([1]) is an aberration (as you must have understood yourself, since you removed them again). I believe there is even a formal rule against linking to other wikipedia versions from articles. But even if there isn't, this consumes way too much "screen real estate" and would have rendered the whole increasingly unusable with the addition of more languages. Whatever its faults may be, Wikipedia's current lingual "superstructure" simply can't be worked around by "internationalizing" the articles. That's it for now. --Thorsten1 21:06, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Hi Thorsten1,

I thought I'd responded to your very good note here, but now can't find what I wrote -- "wrong button" syndrome, maybe :-) -- here's what I remember: you said --

> Ultimately, the development of Sassen's ideas should be outlined in the main part of the article, rather than being left to be inferred from the bibliography.

Good point, and very much my intention: if & as I & others add to the article, the bibliography section in it could be scaled back.

> You asked why we shouldn't be able to include all of Sassen's writings here, of which you said there were 300 or more. You misunderstood me there - of course this is not a technical problem. Rather, the problem is that it is quite difficult to keep up with new publications and track down everything ever published in any language.

This no longer is so difficult. Online digital tools, such as WorldCat and library OPACs and online SDI "alerts", have helped the bibliographic community just as they have helped so many others: assembling "complete" bibliographies is becoming easier and easier, although it is not yet really "easy" for those without the professional training to do it -- Wikipedia can help greatly, in that.

> Whatever its faults may be, Wikipedia's current lingual "superstructure" simply can't be worked around by "internationalizing" the articles.

I've been learning more about that superstructure since you said this, and I am swinging 'round somewhat to your point of view: one original purpose of hypertext being "links" -- the decentralization of data out to distributed nodes where it is more efficiently handled -- & where it more easily escapes occasional destruction of the "center", and "censorship"... -- I suppose we ought to take advantage... OTOH Moore's Law is helping at the center, too: we now have all those great memory & processing advances, and the unit costs keep going down...

So my current thought is that "internationalizing" the articles, as you put it, may be the long-term goal here as everywhere else: that users increasingly are becoming "trans-national", and so should Wikipedia and other information sources. But in the short-term, yes, I now can see various advantages to a [massively distributed collaboration] Wikipedia, for its own multilingual applications as for other purposes. I'm just not sure how the latter will scale up. Most of the Wikipedia users I know already are multilingual and are becoming moreso.

--Kessler 16:26, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

ps: re your page-length warning concern: do you know how to "archive" this page & would you pls show me -- I've seen that on other Talk pages but can't seem to find a reference -- archived pages get compressed, I expect, and save space that way, even though uncompress is automatic when the link is clicked so they're still accessible.