Notre wiki est né

Was it at a recent meeting of 40 members of the Académie Française that the gender of « wiki » was decided? (C’est masculin.) One more infantryman in the invading army of foreign words the French have to deal with: in this case not an English word, but a Hawaiian one, that has come to mean a collaborative website that anyone can contribute to. (Did I end that sentence with a preposition?) In any case, FIAfans now has its own wiki via Wikispaces.

You may have already noticed the link. FIAfan Billy took it upon himself to get this thing off the ground and has been contributing information on FIA episodes/leçons as he has had time. Take a look at the embryonic pages he has created for episodes 33–35. Next time you watch an FIA episode, why not jot down your observations and share them with us on the wiki? Even if you’re unfamiliar with editing wikis, you’ll find it surprisingly easy. (You will need to register with Wikispaces first.)

But, you may wonder, there already is a French-In-Action wiki, namely at Wikipedia, so why another one? The idea is to create a space for not only the factual details, but also for the whimsical, personal and even trivial observations of devoted FIAfans related to the content of the FIA episodes. Understandably, this is not at all what Wikipedia is about.

On Wikipedia’s five pillars page we read:

« Wikipedia is not the place to insert personal opinions, experiences, or arguments. Furthermore, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Wikipedia is not a trivia collection, a soapbox, a vanity publisher, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, or a web directory.« 

Our FIAfans wiki can be all of those things and more! In fact what I like about it is that I have no real idea what it can become. This will be determined by the creative individuals willing to contribute their time. Any FIAfan can participate and I hope many of you will. Comme toujours sur FIAfans, le seul règle est de ne pas être mal élevé. Let’s hope it ends up being amusant et utile pour apprendre le français.

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3 Réponses

  1. I just wrote a post about Mystere et boules de gomme!

    http://pollyvousfrancais.blogspot.com/2007/09/french-in-action.html

    Thanks for doing this — what a great endeavor!

  2. Allez-y, Jennie!

  3. Ooh nice! I have the textbook with all the transcripts and all the videos on my computer, so I can help out with describing the lessons and figuring out what the heck they are saying.

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