Sabine Cretella wrote:
Just a short flashback to what happened - Anthere, Erik and Sandra already know about this, but I don't know if Sue and Cary know - but since they also deal with the fundraiser I would like to inform them as well.
Last year Open Progress received a project for the creation of contents for fa.wikipedia. Preparation time was very short, so the only viable way then was to translate articles from en.wikipedia. This was done. There were of course some discussions with the community and in a chat with Anthere, Erik, two of the translators (Kurosh and Reza), Hessam and another wikipedian from fa.wikipedia, Gerard and me we agreed that the articles were uploaded in a special namespace on fa.wikipedia. The articles are there.
Now we have the situation that we have a donor who would pay an amount of 10 EUR in donations to the WMF if the community of fa.wikipedia looks at the articles, changes what needs changing, adds three incoming links and three outgoing links (blue links) - for 5 further blue outgoing links 1 EUR per article would be added. We would like to avoid to work with people who are not in wikimedia community here - and if possible also in future. Therefore we believe that this is a way how the community can freely work on articles without feeling that something is imposed from outside (like they felt last time) since it is up to them to decide how these articles are going to be integrated.
The thought was that people in Iran cannot donate easily to WMF, but by helping to get these articles right and moving them into the main namespace we have a double effect: the work done was not useless, the articles get integrated into fa.wikipedia and the WMF will get the available money in terms of a donation.
We are talking about 147 articles - that is approx. 1470 EUR for the foundation (or 147 EUR more depending on the outgoing links - or better wikilinks that lead to other articles).
Eventually in future there could be other contents creation projects from our first donor - what I would like to do at this stage is really try to get into a good co-operation with people from fa.wikipedia who at this very moment probably don't see me in the best light. Well this can change. I hope they will understand that we are for involving them to avoid other ways of doing things and to get the money instead of getting them to translators to the WMF.
I wrote first of all Hessam to know his opinion about dealing with it this way: he would communicate the "adapt and move" project to the fa.wikipedia community and then we would see how things go.
So... this is the first time me wearing two hats ... Wikimedia Foundation and Open Progress. I know there will be other circumstances where I will need to do this and it is not always easy.
I hope this way of dealing with this meet your approval.
Hessam: please do not publish for now. I would like to wait two days if there is any opposition or other proposals by anybody who is copied in this mail. Thank you for helping :-) that's really great.
For now have a nice evening!
Going to get the kids to bed ...
Best wishes from Italy,
Sabine
Hello,
I am sorry if I appear a bit obtuse, but I am not sure I fully understand what the proposal is. Can you clarify ?
From what I understand
1) 147 articles were translated in farsi, from english wikipedia, by two professional translators, who were paid by Open Progress
2) the translated articles were not put in the main space, but set up in a separate namespace.
(this was about a year ago. I remember there were some disagreements from the fa community, who did not want to accept the articles)
3) a donor wants to give 1470 EUR (more or less) to WMF, to make sure the articles would be completed (with links) and moved to the main space
What I do not understand is
A) do you expect the WMF to pay 10 euros to the translators to move and complete the articles ?
B) do you expect the WMF to pay some editors to move and complete the articles ?
C) do you expect the move to happen all by itself, and WMF simply keep the donation ?
D) something else ?
In short, will someone be paid ?
By who ?
Who will coordinatate the move and completion ?
Who will decide the job is well done ?
Should the links be "controlled" by the donor ?
Who is paying ? Open Progress or WMF ? What is Open Progress role here ?
Anthere
Thanks Florence. I was hesitant to jump in, thinking I am simply late to the conversation. But those are the questions I have too :-)