Pine, there is one possible way to fund such translation in the future; The
Foundation is building up an endowment. When that endowment has grown to
the point where the annual return is sufficient to fund the Foundation,
then you could re-purpose the annual fundraiser from collecting money to
host Wikipedia, to collecting money to make Wikipedia available in other
languages.
If I'm correct in thinking that part of the problem for many of our widely
spoken languages with weak wikipedias is that the more educated people who
speak those languages are more likely to contribute edits in what is to
them a higher status or more language or one more useful to their career,
then maybe we should test using fundraiser type advertising to ask our
English readers in places like India to translate articles from English to
Indic languages.
In some parts of the world where incomes are generally very low and
financial donations reflect that perhaps we have little to lose by shifting
now from asking for funds to asking for content donations, especially in
the language of that area.
WereSpielChequers
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2018 18:13:38 -0800
> From: Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> Message-ID:
> <CAF=dyJhxBXyhmMPvDYWA4oPGuj3mOTjQ1bP5QQKhGE3U2tDFcA@mail.
> gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> On the subject of paid translation, I could imagine this being included in
> the scope of work for a "Wiki Community Foundation" or "Wiki Content
> Foundation" that would do work that WMF doesn't do and/or shouldn't do. I
> have a number of activities in mind for this kind of organization.
> Unfortunately, I do not know how to fund it. I think that this organization
> should get most of its funding from non-WMF sources, and WMF has such
> strong fundraising capabilities that I think that competing with WMF for
> funding from readers and grant-making organizations would be very
> difficult. If WMF would like to have conversations about how the community
> could raise funds directly from readers and non-WMF foundations, I for one
> would be very interested in having that conversation.
>
> Pine
> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
>
> building an authoritative dictionary is considerably
> harder than building a (de facto) authoritative encyclopedia.
What reason is there to think that? My any measure of editor hours, or
the amount of money it would take to replicate the effort, or the
maintenance load going forward, I'm sure that even a three shelf foot
encyclopedia is harder than a 100,000 word dictionary.
> We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles.
What is the difference between delivering the text of an encyclopedia
article and teaching it? Encyclopedias are not written to be
accompanied by a lecturer, tutor, or teacher. We even teach how to
write them, to students, in schools, and the students often if not
almost always get academic credit for their work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_program/Educators
Knowing any language is a privilege, and suggesting that there is any
reason to narrow the Foundation's focus away from language instruction
seems completely absurd to me.
> Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki articles.
Why? We are already the best at that. Why not make the wiki articles
in Wiktionary better by not just playing audio recordings of words,
which volunteers (not the Foundation) already provide, but meeting
that initiative by recording utterances and predicting whether they
are intelligible pronunciations, and doing the same with recording
gadgets in Wikipedia's pronunciation articles? http://j.mp/irslides
I'm serious that I think the Foundation should hire all my Google
Summer of Code students to support doing that, because it will take
about that many people to set it up so that volunteers can complete
the work for all languages, not just English.
There is no reason that the Foundation can't both pay to translate
Wikipedia articles and pay to up Wiktionary's language instruction
game at the same time. That would have made sense ten years ago, and
the budget is much larger now. We are at a juncture in aligning our
long term strategy to the mission, so I hope both projects get funded.
If it has to be proposed budget-neutral to be compelling, then get rid
of the mobile app and mobile web versions except on platforms where
they are genuinely easier for editors, not just readers, to use.
Best regards,
Jim
Hello Everyone,
The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to present our Annual Plan Mid-Year
report for 2017-18
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/…>,
published on Meta-Wiki.
We would like to extend our appreciation to all of our teams for their hard
work through the first half of this fiscal year. Also, thank you to the
staff, FDC, and community members for your feedback and support as we
continue to improve our planning and reporting practices.
Thank you,
James Baldwin
--
James Baldwin
Sr. Analyst, Community Finance
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery St., Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.Donate.
<https://donate.wikimedia.org/>*
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(Hello, I am trying something new this week by writing in Spanish. I am
hoping to encourage people to contribute to this conversation in their
preferred languages.)
Hola, estoy intentando algo nuevo esta semana escribiendo en español. Espero
animar a las personas a contribuir a esta conversación en sus idiomas
preferidos.
Algo que me hace feliz esta semana es la disponibilidad de "diffs visuales"
como se describe en el Blog de la Fundación Wikimedia:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/02/20/visual-diffs/.
¿Qué te hace feliz esta semana?
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )