Hoi, With some 50% of our traffic in other languages then English it is obvious that languages, internationalisation and localisation are of a profound importance to the WMF. There are over 250 Wikipedias and we support over 300 linguistic entities at translatewiki.net where our internationalisation and localisation is located. When a strategic plan for the WMF is to be made, addressing the needs for these other languages is consequently as important as the needs for the English projects.

When you look at the investments and the projects of the WMF, the other 50% hardly feature. The Usability Initiative is about improving the English Wikipedia, the new project for Commosn is to improve the ability of getting images in while you need to know English to get images out of Commons. When we get 100.000 images from the Tropenmuseum, how will we support Indonesian and English when the annotations are Dutch? What if there are over 200 GLAM in the Netherlands alone ??

The LocalisationUpdate extension is imho the most relevant piece of software to improve the localisation of our projects and to motivate our localisers, it was developed outside of the WMF. The MediaWiki software does not support African languages well. We know what the problem is but we fail African languages.

When I ask for measurments, I ask for numbers that show how the WMF implements its strategy for other languages. How long does it take for localisations to go life. What is the relation between the popularity of our projects for a language and the localisation. What are is the amount of WMF money spend on exclusively English language projects compared to the amount of money exclusively earmarked for the other languages. How many words are used in the annual reports on issues that are English vs the issues for the other languages.

I have been pushing the cause of the "other languages" for quite some time. I would like to see that the "other languages" have as much traction as English in the WMF because I believe the "other projects" have a potential that is bigger then the English Wikipedia. Thanks, GerardM

2009/7/14 Eugene Eric Kim eekim@blueoxen.com

Hi Gerard,

Thanks for the welcome! There are really two questions here: The importance of language, internationalization, and localization in the context of the plan itself, and the importance of all of these things in the context of the strategic process. They'll be important for both.

What specifically are you interested in measuring?

=Eugene

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hoi, There is one question that is obvious for me to ask.. What will the role

be

...

of language, internationalisation and localisation in the strategy of the WMF and how will it be possible to measure this ? Thanks, GerardM

PS Welcome

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Eugene Eric Kim ................................ http://xri.net/=eekim Blue Oxen Associates ........................ http://www.blueoxen.com/ ======================================================================

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