On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
[...] But there are a number of languages in between with active chapter(s) or user group(s) inside of relevant countries. Those languages should be the priority in promotion collaboration.
They are: Arabic (Arabic user groups), Indonesian (WM ID), Hindi (WM IN), Urdu (Pakistani user group), Thai (Thailand UG), Bengali (WM BD), Zulu (WM ZA), Hausa (West African user groups), Xhosa (WM ZA), Afrikaans (WM ZA), Kannada (WM IN), Telugu (WM IN), Tsonga (WM ZA), Malay (WM ID and Malaysian Wikimedians), Marathi (WM IN).
The priorities for those languages should include (but likely not limited to):
- Translation of MediaWiki messages should be 100%.
- Those languages should be priorities for every document which should be
translated. For example, ongoing Board elections; but also various Meta pages.
For some of these languages, I don't see that this makes sense, in terms of investment versus impact, or in terms of putting the cart before the horse. Tsonga, for example, seems to have precisely one active editor[1] -- no doubt, our colleague Dumisani Ndubane (CCed as a courtesy). While it is indeed his native language, it does not seem like a good investment of effort to translate hundreds of pages and thousands of strings into Tsonga when he (and, with overwhelming likelihood, any other literate speaker of Tsonga) is also fluent (and educated in) English. Xhosa, Hausa and Zulu are in the same class[2][3][4].
The other languages you mention, on the other hand, already have established, active communities. We can indeed make more of an effort to encourage greater participation by those communities (and thereby by speakers of those languages) in international goings-on via increased participation in volunteer translation, regular or semi-regular reporting (so that it's not all one-way). This is in fact generally done by some of us whenever we are in contact with folks from those communities.
Crucially, I don't see that the problem lends itself to outside "engineering". If we want more interchange with, say, the Telugu community, we should talk to it. I know I do.
- We should have the pool of literate people in those languages for various
purposes, not just for translation. For example, if we want to create projects in languages of Pakistan, we should have a number of literate Urdu speakers, willing to help newcomers speaking Urdu as their L2 language.
Again, there already exists a community of dedicated contributors to the Urdu Wikipedia[5] (apparently more from India than from Pakistan, no doubt partially due to script issues[6]). Some of you, particularly in the last year, have been energetically mentoring newcomers and doing outreach activities. Our colleagues Nisar Ahmad Syed and Muzammiluddin Syed (CCed) are two such volunteers. Now, what, precisely, are you suggesting?
Cheers,
Asaf
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryTS.htm [2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryXH.htm [3] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryHA.htm [4] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryZU.htm [5] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryUR.htm [6] Urdu Wikipedia is configured to use the Naskh script (used in India) rather than the Nasta'liq script (favored in Pakistan)