Dear translators,

This thread on f-l is an important conversation to have across various projects and languages.

Perhaps a short page summarizing the idea and discussion can be put up and actively translated. Especially since a point of discussion is "how widely translated should these planning discussions be" and even "can groups working officially on this sort of planning do its work primarily in a language of their choice".

I feel strongly about the topics involved, so I'd prefer not to be the one making the initial summary.

Luckily, there is no urgent pressing deadline, but people are suggesting having an initial outline about this process ready by early this summer - still rather soon if the outline will already contain suggested directions, divisions, and instructions on how/where to communicate further.

SJ

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com Date: Sat, May 2, 2009 at 1:27 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] More on Wikimedia strategic planning To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org

GerardM writes

When you want to transcend local policies and guidelines, you have to start thinking on a more global level. On this level there are big and small Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks etc. There are projects that serve a global need and are the victim of local constraints like Commons and also Meta. We are not organised in a way that gives priority to the more global issues and consequently we are very much unaware of issues that the "others" face and why our "local" issues can be irrelevant elsewhere.

+1.   This should be an iterative process, and one of the first steps should be improving organisation of goals/priorities so that global issues are visible everywhere (and <cough> not only in English.  If this is an important conversation, it too should be had in other languages).   Likewise nonstandard local issues - as a member of a federation of states, I believe a diversity of local goals and implementations is useful for this type of planning).

SJ