On Jan 15, 2008 6:55 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
I hope you will appreciate that this policy only aims to improve the localisation in all languages for us all. If anything the policy and the hard work at BetaWiki have shown to have a good effect. Things have already improved quite substantially over the last few months.
As I said before, I have been granted sysopship on two Japanese projects. And generally Japanese are eager to localize messages. I am talking here as an individual, as a normal editor, not Transcom Chair nor former Board Election Comittee Chair but I am strongly convinced all my colleagues both past and present may witness how I put my energy for multilingualism and getting the global community involved into Wikimedia movement through activities in their own langauges. And as a sysop, unless I am very occupied, I've been tried to respond localization requests from the community who granted me the access.
As such I daresay, if there is unlocalized message in Japanese setting, it reflects no one interested in that, no one feels the needs to localize it, no one think it hinders his activities in his own language. And I repeat here Japanese are not so much good in English. The localization get people involved into Wikimedia project? Simply no, I say from my experience. In the past Wikimedia elections since 2004, I was getting involved into boardwiki related messages localization from the beginning, and sure all messages were localized but it can be hardly said to get jawiki people involved into Foundation matters. In my case, it could be a factor but rather the emergence of *not yet localized* Japanese Wikiquote may have affect my involvement greatly, so I don't agree demanding full localization is the absolute requirement for project progression.
Let us summarize: it is no factual argument the reason required localization is a must for a project. Rather I agree with Cormac. There would be better to no difference between first project and later. The community knows what their language community needs in their linguistic circumstance. Far better than you, Gerald.