Aah, I believe I succeeded in tracking the right direction now,
On 5/4/06, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
This said, I believe that a mid-way can be found.
How about launching a massive translation rally (A translsation of the week maybe?) of Commons main page that would translate in smaller languages a "default" type of main page that does not need to be updated?
Good idea. Not completely, but it has been already applied to the Foundation website. Some languages (eh, or only English now?) are updated more frequently than other languages, and some languages updated rarely, like Korean, were removed sections which needs frequent updating.
For languages whose editors are hard to avail quickly, it is helpful to set a page which contains minimum required information - even stats would be a potential cause of aches for those languages. But after all, a mite is infinitely valuable than void.
While I believe I see the reasoning about getting rid of the "smaller" languages on the main page, while I understand the problem of having outdated main pages, I totally agree that smaller languages should not be penalized in accessing commons.
*nod*
As a P&T member, I daresay it would be a strategic loss to remove big languages like Spanish / Japanese, whose projects are steadly growing and many speakers of them are involved into the project, or just are frequent visitors.
I admit it is a problem to have a start page poorly maintained, but a shabby main page in their own languages are far better than splendid main page written in a language they can hardly read. And again, I'd like you to be aware there are some languages which fairly activated projects with a huge number of pageview but poorly involved into the so-called grobal activities of Wikimedia project - plainly activities of English speaker both native and as foreign/second.
Besides those practical reasons, we could pay attention to emotional aspects. Small languages' editors and visitors once removed would feel dissapointment, sadness, disrespect or just anger. Addition is normally no problem at that time: but removal has often caused a raged, or at least negative reaction as far as I have experienced on this problem.
Some of us can be recalled Hebrew Wikipedia past preferences to restrict interlangs. They had their reasons, but its effect was, in my opinion, disasterous rather than inpragmatic; some good editors were raged and declaired their entire quitting from the project, even their mother langue's. Later He people changed their mind and hostile between them and other some editors dissapeared. I think this episode has its moral stil now.
I am not going to argue that Mediawiki is not fit for a multilingual website today, although that is probably the primary problem of commons.
So as meta, but it needs much more time and powerful hands of developers to resolve.
-- Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com