If one would post a message to all vilage pumps in english, I can see the maillist flooded by messages concerning "anglosaxism", "language pushing", "discrimination", etc. I don't think that would be a solution.
Bryan
On 12/30/06, Teun Spaans teun.spaans@gmail.com wrote:
How? - by a bot.
On the english wiki, I am a member of the Military history WikiProject. There is a newsletter, which appears every monbth or two months. All members are notified on their talk page. By a bot. Surely, if a project can manage this, the core of wikimedia can mange this? I admit, some volunteers are needed to do this.
Yes, the language is a problem. At the moment I see no alternative to English. Translation by babelfish gives terrible results. At least at start, there wont be volunteers able to translate it. You are right that the next complaint will be that the message is in english. When we have taken this step, and the complaint comes, we can invite them to translate it.
One of the problems with the current communication is that we rely a lot on "pull", not on "push". The information is posted somewhere, and it is left to the wikipedians to visiti these places frequently and read it. It is up to the wikipedians to discover these places. It is up to the wikipedians to go to these places frequently. It is up to the wikipedians to read them It is up to the wikipedians to act on it. This holds true for communication from the foundation. This is true for information from the local chapters. This is true for information from commons, such as deletions. It is true for policy changes on commons.
There is no information brought to the door. I think it might be time to change all this. We might start about thinking delivering selected information to the people on their talk pages. information in the village pumps.
I dont say we should communicate everything to everyone, but we may start thinking about such a change in our communication strategy.
We are already communicating to the outside world based on "push". When the english wiki reaches it n-th million article, whap, out goes a press release. The same for commons: when the 1 million images milestone was reached. We dont wait till the media visit our sites to discover it, we go out and tell them. It wouldnt be bad when we followed the same line internally.
teun
On 12/30/06, Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/30/06, Teun Spaans teun.spaans@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps a bot posting sensitive messages into every village pump, simply in english, would be a solution.
How? It would work somewhere. It wouldn't work in other places. If we care the entire community, it is not the way we are going to, regretfully I admit that is roughly what we are doing though. Principally I have find no difference between communications via sitenotice and ones via VP.
On non-English projects, speically non Indo-European language projects, I have seen some (important to some extent) messages posted in English and left without comment. In this way the possiblity of translation doesn't depend on its importance but genuinly availability of volunteering translators. The next possible complaint would be "why it came in English but not in our language?"
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