{{sofixit}} :)
2011/2/24 M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com
There are currently 13 members of the committee, all of them live in Europe, the US or Canada with the sole exception of Amir Aharoni, who currently lives in Jerusalem but lived in Russia until 1991 and whose native language is Russian. I find it hard to believe that the language committee has been actively recruiting Wikimedians or others in Asia, Latin America or Africa but faced constant rejection and lack of interest from all people in those places, which is the impression I got from what you said. I think the appropriate reaction to such a strong imbalance (and it is a very strong one) is not to say "Well, we will be happy to have them if they ever want to join" but to say "We recognize that this is an issue and we will actively recruit people to try to rectify it."
2011/2/24, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
As far as I am aware, but please correct me if I'm wrong, the language committee has always tried to gather a large diversity from all over the world. However, it seems hard to find people from underrepresented
regions
to bother themselves with this boring matter (no offense). So if you know
a
good candidate from a region you feel is underrepresented, just put them
in
touch with Gerard and I'm confident they will be able to at least incorporate the knowledge.
Best regards,
Lodewijk
2011/2/24 M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com
To me, this is still a problem. If the committee never made any decisions and instead relied 100% on the opinions of others, then perhaps the composition wouldn't matter. However, think about this: if you gather a committee to make decisions about agriculture and recruit only from European countries, you will find a very different group of opinions than if you recruit from Africa or India. The same is certainly the case here. The way people think about languages and linguistic diversity differs around the world, and it is not to our benefit to have a committee composed of mostly people from one part of the world, especially considering that over 60% of Earth's population lives in Asia. What I am not suggesting is that we should invite the world's foremost expert on Hindi or Sino-Tibetan languages to be a member of the committee; what I am suggesting is that we should invite people similar to existing members, except that they happen to be from Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. So people with a deep interest in many languages, who can bring us different perspectives.
2011/2/23, Casey Brown lists@caseybrown.org:
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
wrote:
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:55, Bishakha Datta <
bishakhadatta@gmail.com>
wrote:
One thought occurred to me: there is no representation of Asian
languages
in the committee (and I don't mean only Indian languages). Would the committee want to consider an expansion in membership to include someone who
is
fluent in one or more Asian languages?
In principle yes, but... [1]
Linguistic qualifications for becoming a LangCom member are not so simple. After a couple of years in LangCom, I may say that many professors of linguistics don't fit. And the main reason is not their knowledge, but attitude toward languages. Or, to be more precise, their boldness. For example, LangCom tasks require from one Indo-Europeanist to give expertize on any Indo-European language, but many of them would say that the classification of, let's say, Kurdish languages is not the part of their job, but the part of the job of an expert in Iranian languages. Such expert in LangCom is basically useless.
Doesn't the language committee also actively seek out experts in different languages when they need to? I seem to recall you guys having all test wikis checked by a linguist/expert who speaks the language before they are created.
So it's not like people who speak Asian (or other similar) languages aren't being actively involved, it's just that none of them are in the "administrative committee" at this time. At least that's how I remember it being explained many threads ago. :-)
-- Casey Brown Cbrown1023
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