On 5/27/05, Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Hiya
I think ... trashing on wikipedia-l... is now a habit.
I really apology for starting such a mess 2 days ago; I just could not
foresee some people could take so badly my comments. Even those on spanish
americans which I felt was really polite and not critical. But this was my
mistake.
I feel very low about all this right now. I strongly have the feeling that
either what we write on wikipedia-l will lead to criticism, to insult or
belittling, or that what we write will meet a total wall of silence. I am
not sure I joined wikipedia for this. Neither for harsh criticism like we
got about the html letter, nor for silence like on some recent topics where
absolutely no feed back was given. I am actually balancing between either
unregistering the wikipedia-l, or telling a couple of people very rude
things.
Regardless..., Cormac..., I think that if so many people registered the news
list, it means that many are interested. So, this should cheer us up. We can
do it steps by steps. Each version will bring a new improvement. This time,
the improvement will be 1) a mail address 2) many people registered and 3) a
mail. This is good. Improvements will be brought to number 4.
Absolutely. There's been pretty steady subscription to the
foundation-news-l list so we'll hopefully at least get good feedback
from the people who wanted this. On the "trashing", I think that only
a few comments were genuinely negative - the others were just saying
that they hate html emails and block them personally - nothing bad
there. What i was annoyed about was that very few people actually
tried to answer my question, which was whether you can send out a
multi-lingual mail in the first place.
As I told Samuel, I would really like that Quarto 3 is
published before the
elections are done. First because it is high time, second because it
summarize many of the things we have been doing, and third because I tried
to explain a little bit how the board has been working in the past year.
I rather doubt it will be all translated before the end of the elections;
But I wish it is ;-)
Still, I think that as soon as it is entirely done in english (are only left
a few polishing details and translation of the board letter - I hope all is
done by this week end), we should announce it in english. Perhaps only in
the english wikipedia and the foundation-l, and call for help for
translation.
Good luck, bon chance, buen suerte... :)
It would be good that the email announcement is made
before 2 weeks. 3
maximum. I know it won't be all translated in many languages by then. But I
think if it is announced in 5 weeks, it will not be good.
Regarding your planned posting, I have a suggestion to do. I am not sure I
understand why you want to do this test posting, but for testing if things
are working fine. If not, explain to me the reason of the test ?
If testing is the reason, I am a bit worried of the idea of sending the
announcement of quarto number 2 as a test... People will really get confused
!!!
I might then make a suggestion : why not sending as a test the announcement
for quarto 3 available in english ?
Later, we will send the announcement in more languages.
This was just in response to what Sj posted on my meta talk page last
night: "Cormac, greetings. What do you say to sending out a text
quarto email this weekend? A test balloon, reminding people where they
can find WQ2. The English edition will be published, and next week
after we have the first translations with a translated reports page,
we can send out another." I presumed it was to test that the mailing
list works and then to do another one for WQ3.
If so, what we really need as text is
Object of the mail : Newsletter of the Foundation : Quarto 3 released in
english !
en:
This is the announcement for quarto 3. It will contain blablalbla....
blablabla
blablabla
link.
de:
<in german>Quarto 3 has been released in english version. Translation in
other languages is under way. We'll keep you informed of the release in
german"</in german>
fr:
<in french>Quarto 3 has been released in english version. Translation in
other languages is under way. We'll keep you informed of the release in
french"</in french>
What do you think ?
At worse, we can even add a little text in english at the top, saying
"This is the first mail sent through this list and we are very much in the
testing phase. Please forgive us if anything goes wrong :-) Thanks."
What do you think ?
If this is okay to you, we mostly need to fix the little non english
sentence and have it translated in say 2-3 days. It should not be a huge
problem.
If not okay, you should correct the french version, it mentions third
trimester rather than fourth :-)
Cheers
Ant
Personally, I'm fine with all of the above. It should be easy to
translate a sentence or two, having one link in it. But my fundamental
concern remains: I still cannot get this to work as a *multilingual
message that will show correctly in all email clients*. I emailed the
test to my yahoo account and it is illegible - though it looks fine in
gmail. On the wikipedia-l thread, Mark Williamson, Chad Perrin and
Yann Forget all assured me that this was possible, but I still don't
understand how it works for definite. Frankly, I don't feel like
asking again on the 'other' mailing list - although if we say that it
will just be text-only, we shouldn't get another trashing. Ascánder
was most helpful before - any more ideas? Also, since we're not
dealing with html code and dreamweaver etc., feel free everyone to
experiment until we get this right.
Cormac