Multilingualism philosophies
There are many texts about Wikipedia multilingualism (e.g. Thoughts on Wikipedia interlanguage priorities), but there is no overview of possibly different Wikipedia philosophies related to multilingualism. Problems of multilingualism are even not represented in Template:Philosophy at all. Please, help to fill in this gap. The following text is a list of different views of the Multilingualism, probably existing (but possibly not).
Unilingualism[edit]
A practice, opposite to the whole of multilingualism. Some people use only their native language, another probably read in many languages, but contribute in one language only, because of nationalism or other ideological reason, or even because of laziness.
Many articles and categories do not have any interwiki, while there are some alien versions at the time of creation. It happens possibly because of the creator's unilingualism.
Omnilingualism[edit]
The task of Wikipedia is to cover all Earth's languages, at least all widely-used languages. Any Wiki's language section should be self-consistent, Wikipedia should be useful for people who can only read one (native) language. Interwikis are only a writers' tool for content exchange.
There are too many language sections — probably because omnilingualists supported its creation.
Translationism[edit]
The article's versions on different languages should have almost the same content. NPOV in some article should be an average POV over all language versions of the article.
Probably, participants of such projects as machine translation are translationists.
Unificationism[edit]
Different sections' structure should be as close as possible. They should share the same structure of categories. If there are two different articles on 2 notions (close or related, but not identical) in most languages, then a section which have one (combined) article should split it.
Independism[edit]
Wikipedia should generally expect a multilingual user, but all languages sections are independent. The best we could do with multilingualism is to translate some pieces of information which are missing in target language, or to use sources and links offered by alien language's article. Attempts to find an average POV (between different languages speakers), or to establish some unified structure, are generally pointless.
This philosophy, if exists, should oppose both unificationism and translationism.
Interwikism(?)[edit]
A philosophy, represented by at least one man :) Carefully made interwikis have its own value, regardless of are different sections' structure similar or not.
See User:Incnis Mrsi/Interwikism.