On 13/07/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
So, if I read you well, you consider that the fact the
notices were not
translated in languages such as arabic and chinese, should be blamed on
the board.
My comment about translation was actually in reply to Ray' Saintonge's
message about (in response to me) about low
participation/responsibility of raising election awareness. He said
If eligible voters can't be bothered to
look when an election is advertised in all reasonable
places, they get
the result they deserve.
I replied,
It's pretty funny to blame
people for not being aware of something happening when
there wasn't
even information available in their language for them to read about
it.
I consider the important part of my message to actually be:
I consider it WMF's responsibility to communicate
to its projects what
the relationship between them is. I consider it WMF's responsibility
to communicate to Wikimedians about why the election (and indeed WMF
itself) is important.
If people have the attitude "why should we vote, who cares, how is
this relevant anyway", then I think this communication is not too
successful.
Australia is due to have a federal election in late 2007. At the
moment there is lots of neutral advertising from the Electoral
Commission encouraging people to enrol to vote/ensure their electoral
roll details are accurate.
Maybe an election is an appropriate time to request/hire outside help.
It was done for the vote counting, why not the election organising?
The election and has come and gone, and on the whole IMO it was
handled well. I don't mean to attack the committee or the Board about
it.
That the board pays translators ?
[...]
I also think that if the board makes the decision to
hire translators,
there will be a HUGE uproar of complaints, because we indeed have the
resources internally.
As Sue Reed said, If we do, then where were they? If no one
volunteers, IMO it would be appropriate to pay translators for events
such as this.
regards
Brianna