French Wikipedia

Categories: Wikipedia, France

The '''French Wikipedia''' is a [[French language]] [[Wikimedia]] project with, as of March 2020, about 2 million articles. This makes it about one-third the size of the [[Wikipedia|English Wikipedia]].

However, there are many differences that offset this perceived disadvantage. As of March 2020, the French Wikipedia lacked a functioning [[Arbitration Committee]], eliminating one avenue by which, e.g., [[discretionary sanctions]] might be applied to [[inceldom]]-related articles, or by which users might be banned. As of September 2020, the French Wikipedia had set up an Arbitration Committee.<ref>https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Comit%C3%A9_d%27arbitrage</ref> Also, [[feminist]] and [[incelphobic]] users such as [[Flyer22]] and [[GorillaWarfare]] who patrol sex- and gender-related articles on the English Wikipedia are not present on the French Wikipedia, presumably because they lack enough knowledge of French. Indeed, hardly any of the female users of the French Wikipedia are very active or have been promoted to administrator posts.<ref>https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9dienne_ou_Wikip%C3%A9dien</ref> Moreover, many of the sex-related articles that have been battlegrounds for edit wars on the English Wikipedia, and therefore have had permanent semi-protection and discretionary sanctions applied to them, are unprotected on the French Wikipedia.

Thus, in general, the atmosphere on the French Wikipedia is mostly more laid-back; the main exception being that a user who does not write good French is subject to having his work deleted. The community encourages, instead, that people who are still at a beginning or intermediate level of French write drafts for review. Also, the usual requirements of reliable sourcing apply, which has had the result that the incel article on the French Wikipedia is as cucked as the [[Wikipedia incel article|English Wikipedia incel article]], due to the anti-incel bias in the mainstream media and academic sources.<ref>https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel</ref> However, [[FeminismIsCancer]] has noted that the [[zoophilia]] article on the French Wikipedia is relatively neutral and balanced.

The learning curve required to get to an acceptable level of French proficiency weeds out most American women, who lack the diligence to engage in that kind of serious study and practice just to push a political or cultural agenda; and since French-speaking countries apparently do not have many homegrown feminists who have opted to get involved in Wikipedia, incels do not encounter this type of virulent feminism so much there. Also, since the French Wikipedia is not read or cared about much by the American and British media, there are not so many "scandals" that erupt in which [[Jimbo Wales]] is alerted to "[[problematic]]" articles and users in need of his intervention to address by imposing certain policies, banning certain users, etc.
==Methods of editing==
Those whose knowledge of French grammar is ''moins-que-parfait'' (less than perfect) may wish to avail themselves of a French grammar checker such as Reverso's.<ref>https://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/french-spelling-grammar/</ref> Running articles (not the raw wikitext, but the parsed text, as it will mangle raw wikitext) through that checker will help catch some of the most obvious grammatical and spelling errors, although one will want to take its advice with a grain of salt since it can also introduce new errors. Then a next step can be to run the corrected text through Google Translate's French-to-English translator to see if it catches any errors in meaning (e.g. omitted words, or use of tenses other than what were intended).

An editing practice that will ''not'' work is simply putting English prose into Google Translate's English-to-French translator and copypasting that, as French Wikipedians are adept at recognizing such automatic translations and will speedily delete them. Unlike some of the other Wikipedias, such as the [[Cebuano Wikipedia]], the French Wikipedia is determined to fend off the scourge of low-quality automatic translations, and basically one will have to abandon one's account and start fresh if ever caught using an automatic translator due to the damage it can do to one's reputation and ability to get work published there.<ref>https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18526739/wikipedia-translation-tool-machine-learning-ai-english</ref> As a matter of fact, even writing a bad French translation by hand of an English article can result in one's piece getting deleted as «Usage d'un traducteur automatique».
==See also==
*[[Francel]]
*[[Wikipedia#Non-English Wikipedias]]

==References==
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Wikipedia]]
[[Category:France]]