Hi
I think it would have been more efficient Rose, if you
had directly copyedited the few points you mention
here, rather than take the time to explain them here
and we wait for someone to fix them.
I frankly do not know what to do. We rely on volunteer
work entirely. If people do not do something, there
are only three options
* We close our eyes and keep what is poorly done this
way. We just sigh and move on. The consequences being
mostly we appear like jerks, leaving typos,
inconsistencies ...
* We decide to stop the whole stuff, wait for no one
to come and do the job and end up not publishing
anything. The main consequence would here typically to
hear again that the board communicate nothing of what
it does, and act in a non transparent way. This is
essentially what has been happening for the whole
month. Editing has been finished for several weeks and
we have been waiting in hope people help. No
proofreading was done. At some point, that means
either no one is ready to do the job, so what is the
point waiting ? or that means the whole content is
perfect.
* We do the job ourselves, even if non english, even
if proofreading is a job we know nothing about. Sorry,
I will not do that. I do not have the time.
I am perplex about what to do. I had *hoped* that this
quarto could be published last month. It was delayed.
I had hoped it could be published during board
candidacies. It was delayed. I had hoped it could be
published during elections. It was delayed. It makes
little sense to publish things 6 months after they
occured.
Currently, the proofreading process is the one working
the least. All steps are difficult, but this one is
the most difficult one, because we wait for things to
improve and nothing happens.
I frankly do not know what to do. I just know I am all
for the board giving more information to the community
and making it available widely. But this requires help
from many people. If information is never given before
6 months each time, I think we should give up hoping
to give information this way entirely.
I really hope someone can give me some insight on this
matter.
Ant
--- rose.parks(a)att.net wrote:
Hi Members,
I know that I have been unable to copyedit much
of the current version of Quarto. I am truly sorry
about this. Unfortunately, I have been dealing with
some rather serious medical problems.
I did read both Sj's and Anthere's remarks on
the state of WQ/3 and their plans to announce
publication this Monday. I, immediately, went to the
site, in hopes that someone had done some of the
copyediting/proofreading, which I have been unable
to get to. Unfortunately, other than the removal of
some material, I see neither copyediting nor
proofreading done on the English version.
Therefore, there remain numerous proofreading
errors and some copyediting errors. Further there
are numerous references to events, etc. after March
31.
I really think you should reconsider whether
publication at this time is appropriate. The Quarto,
in a way, represents Wikimedia. To publish it full
of errors does nothing to improve our image.
Further, I feel that no task should depend on
the availability of one member. I did contact
everyone, who signed up as a copyeditor. As far as I
can tell, there are no other active English
copyeditors. This is a bad situation.
I am including just a few errors, to give you
an idea of the sort of problems that still exist in
this edition.
Page 3 - Overview
With the collected money, we already purchased some
technical equipment
(
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware) in 2005.
Last orders were done in january
Less purchases were done than expected early 2005
due to the numerous hosting proposals we received.
The donator of the first french squids donated three
additional ones, soon to be hosted by Lost Oasis for
free. In early april, the Wikimedia Foundation
signed an agreement with Yahoo ! (see special report
below).
Page 3 - Caches Installed near Paris
The caches work as follows: if they hold the
requested page in their local memory, they serve it
directly; otherwise, they forward the request to the
main Florida servers, and memorizes the answer while
passing it to the browser of the Wikipedia user.
The Paris servers, on the other hand, have much
smaller rountrip times from the countries they
serve.
I, sincerely, hope you will reconsider your
decision. I think all contributing members, who
speak English, should read the English version and
express their opinions.
As Ever,
Ruth Ifcher
--
-------------- Original message
----------------------
From: Sj <2.718281828(a)gmail.com>
A constellation of counterpoints.
> First, Sj reported that we now really have a
design team, taking care of the
> images, cover and pdf version. I saw a
couple of
days ago an example of a
> pdf version and I was really impressed; I
can't
wait :-) When do you
> perceive the pdf will be available ? One
week ?
More ?
My plan is to finish the English version by
tomorrow (yes, so it can
be announced on Monday!), and to have draft pdf
pages for an octavo (a
16-pg layout) sometime next week.
I have to talk to zanimum and schneelocke to make
sure this is possible.
> I'll dig up the last announcement made for
Quarto2 and will put it in
meta
> pages for improvement. It would be great to
announce at the same time the
> mail system is now up and a PDF version will
be
available.
Good. I think we can safely announce that we will
release a pdf
version of WQ3; that should be translated also.
There are currently
66 people signed up to receive this mail.
> I think this version was definitly easier than
issue 1 and 2, so the way the
pages are
cut/displayed might be the good solution.
There seems to be general agreement here :-) And
I also hope that
people will feel more free to just add their
content directly; or at
least to create meta pages directly with complete
articles. We have
been encouraging that of all contributors to this
past edition;
I will more actively moderate the draft pages so
that new contributors
feel welcome.
> Fifth, Sj, could it be possible that you put the
working frame of version
number 4
as soon as possible.
Yes, perhaps as soon as Monday. The draft page
for WQ 4, for anyone
who has lost it among the growing number of
Quarto
pages, is here:
current English edition is
finalized.
--
+sj+
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