TOPAZ Tarnished

I've written approvingly of PLoS ONE before, and it's also good to see that the underlying software platform will be open source. But I was disappointed to read this post calling for some "help to shape the future":

Now is your chance to get very actively involved in the creation of TOPAZ, the new Open Source publishing platform which PLoS is involved in developing and which will be supporting PLoS ONE when it launches. What we need is some people in the San Francisco area who would be willing to be on a focus group to give us some advice on the feel and functionality that you would like to see. It is a great project and we really do want your views.

Surely a global perspective is absolutely critical to what PLoS ONE is trying to achieve? So limiting focus groups to a very particular part of the anglophone world seems foolish, to say the least.

And it's not as if there aren't other ways that this could be done, taking input from all around the world. For example, I've heard this thing called "The Internet" can be quite handy in these circumstances....

The Other WWW: World-Wide Wikipedia

Wikipedia is deservedly famous, but there is a tendency to conflate Wikipedia with the english version of it. One of Wikipedia's many great achievements - alongside its huge size and the innovative partipation of large numbers of people - is that it is energising communities all around the world to create local versions in languages other than English. There is a list of the main languages at the foot of the main English Wikipedia page.

As Wikipedia explains:

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to manually translate articles. The various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through "InterWiki" links and pages to request translations, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.

Given this global diversity, and the lack of appreciation of efforts outside the Anglophone world, it's good to see that this three-way interview with leading Wikipedians includes voices from Germany and Japan as well as the obvious English one.