Translation for french people
Erik propose de faire une collection de sous domaines pour meta. Il soutient que nous serons plus efficace dans notre collaboration globale en b�n�ficiant d'un sous site personnel, chacun restant d�sormais bien gentillement dans son domaine perso. Les pages de d�cision et r�gles communes pourront �tre traduites.
Anthere n'est pas d'accord et pr�f�rerait que le language de l'interface puisse �tre choisi dans les pr�f�rences, et un syst�me de navigation entre langues mis au point.
Erik Moeller wrote:
Anthere-
Meta is the only place where we can really meet, and
find information
that someone else left.
Can you give me a single example where splitting
Meta by subdomain would
do any harm in bringing people together? I would
like to move this
discussion from the general, emotional "Don't split
us up!" to the
specific, rational "This is where it would cause
problems" level. What
recent policy discussion or vote would have been
harmed by this approach?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership_fees and related pages A lot of it was the result of online discussions, more by email, and more on meta. I cannot really figure spreading the result of these on 150 subwikis, and I cannot really figure following discussion about it on 150 subwikis either. A central place is the only option.
A central place where everyone is allowed to give his opinion.
Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an
example. The whole
discussion was mostly English as was the voting
page. If we used
subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that
the page be
translated into the main languages before we vote.
We could have
aggregated the votes from the different language
Wikimedias so that each
community could express their preferences in their
language. We could have
translated important arguments from the discussion
in realtime (in the
form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for
example).
We could have
Did we ?
This is a lot better than having a single page with
the occasional piece
of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple
of participants. In
that case, the main part of the page is English -
excluding those who
don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion
are not - excluding
those who don't speak that language. It's a
lose-lose situation.
Spreading the discussion in 150 subwikis is the lose-lose situation.
In my experience, it does bring people together,
provided that you
welcome the interaction.
I can't interact with someone whose language I do
not speak, unless
someone translates it for me. A Wikipedia-style
setup facilitates that.
No. You will not be able to interact with the others in both cases, but in the current case, you will at least see that they make effort to communicate. Or you at least give them the opportunity to try. When they are parked in a submetawiki, you will not even know they tried to communicate.
Plus, there are japanese and chinese people
currently over there. We
have Tomos, Suisui, Britty etc...
Exactly - the people on Meta are mostly the ones who
speak some amount of
English. Someone who doesn't speak any English won't
even understand the
user interface.
Correct. Then what about fixing the interface so that we could choose the interface language ? This would be the win-win situation, not packing people in another place.
We could also find a way to navigate between languages.
This is what is happening on the multinlingual
mailing lists, because
each time someone DARE putting a word in a language
different than
english, he is severely told that "of course, he
could write in english,
because really, no one can understand him".
First, I must remind you that my main objection in
the last debate on this
matter was using a different language in order to
exclude others from a
certain comment. This is a completely separate
issue, and I would have the
same objection on Meta.
Second, if you want to reach the *largest number* of
people, you should
either use English or make sure that what you say
gets translated into
English. That should be very obvious, no? It would
be helpful if you could
acknowledge this simple point.
I acknowledge this point.
But this is not a valid argument to technically separate people.
This is about giving non-English projects a larger
voice instead of
relying on multilingual people like you to act as
mouthpieces for those
who don't speak English.
Ah, the mouthpiece is back :-) You have not been much on meta and mediawiki these days Erik. Or you would have seen that now two french people are now part of the developers, and on meta, people like Villy, Looxix, Yann just to cite a few, are very regularly participating. And we definitly do not always agree. They participate to wikimedia wide issues by being on *common* mailing list, and *common meta*. Park us on separate meta, and on separate mailing list, our interaction with you all will stop.
It just make no sense to try to maintain most pages on meta in 150 languages. What makes our force is to make them together. It would be great that they are translated, and I intend to have a french version of the wikimediafoundation website the more I can. However, there are just not enough people interested to do the translation. This is a structural issue we can not go against, however hard we try.
Just like there is a Wikipedia community for
every language, there should be a Wikimedia
community for each. Once you
have something like ja.wikimedia.org, the creation
of a Japanese Wikimedia
chapter becomes more likely as well because people
will find it far easier
to interact when there is no constant interference
by what is *effectively
indistinguishable from random noise* to them. The
problem of creating
project-wide policies is addressed through board
review and voting
standards.
It may be a good idea to put this issue to a
Wikimedia-wide vote if we
fail to reach consensus.
Regards,
Erik
Ah voting !
Yes, sure.
Well, you are welcome :-) But I would be happy that this vote is not a 3 days sampling this time, but really a wikimedia-wide vote. With say 1 month of discussion, translation of all relevant argument in all major languages, and at least 2 week long vote.
My, this would really be a major decision for our future as a global community. It deserves that.
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