My Other Blog

This is why people with autism probably shouldn’t blog.

I got a comment on my blog from a Mr. Cyde Weys (I’ll bet he was teased a lot in school— Cyde Weys/Side Ways, get it?)  Said comment was as follows:

Wikipedia, the “Liberal Encyclopedia”? Way to trash your credibility before even getting to the details. Here’s a tip for you: Wikipedia is written from a global perspective. There are a lot of English-speaking countries out there that are NOT the United States. The United States is the most conservative amongst them.

People in other nations tend to think that Wikipedia is too conservative.

Now, as a person with autism I have problems communicating with other people, tending to assume other people are as educated, intelligent and well-informed as I am when I ought to know that isn’t so.

When I use Wikipedia, I am as likely to use it in other languages rather than English. The Wikipedia I am most likely to use is the Esperanto version, commonly known as Vikipedio, la libera enciklopedio. For those of you who are not yet fluent in Esperanto (and shame on you!) this means ‘Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia’.  The word ‘liberal’, in case you don’t know it, derives from the same Latin root word as the Esperanto word ‘libera’.  If you are not sure what the word ‘liberal’ means, do look it up in the dictionary. There you will find that the word has many meanings outside the political one Mr. Weys is familiar with. Mostly involving generosity with one’s resources. Can any intelligent person deny that Wikipedia is acting liberally (in the ‘generosity’ sense) by providing a very excellent encyclopedia for free in many languages?

Mr. Weys is also under the impression that Wikipedia is ‘global’ rather than American. This is not so. Like most institutions on the internet, it is affected by the fact that computer technology and internet access is much more widely available to Americans, and mostly in English. It has in the most recent time become more common in Western Europe, particularly among those fluent in English— which, in spite of English being taught in European schools, is far from everybody!

Non-European non-Americans are beginning to get computer access in the more techno-friendly parts of the world such as Japan and Korea. But for a great part of the globe, the internet— and Wikipedia— might as well not exist.

As for comparing the United States and other countries in regards to being ‘conservative’, I would like to assure Mr. Weys that this is just not possible. There are too many interpretations of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ floating around the globe to make that meaningful.  And as for the United States being the most ‘conservative’, that is a frank insult to the many nations around the world that are far more faithful to conservative principles than the US is.

But of course one cannot blame Mr. Weys too much for being ignorant if he doesn’t even speak any Esperanto. How can you communicate globally when you aren’t able to meet the rest of the globe halfway, linguistically speaking?

But of course as a person with autism I don’t have much of a chance of communicating globally myself no matter how many languages I speak or how much I know about the world (I know very little about the world, and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know).

For those of you who are waiting with bated breath (or baited breath, for you fishermen out there) for my update on buttockless chickens, fear not, that is still to come, possibly with actual pictures of actual buttockless chickens.  

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