On 2016-03-11 15:58, Sydney Poore wrote:
I agree with antanana / Nataliia Tymkiv that broader
translation of WMF
BoT
election pages is important.
To reach the goal where "every single person on the planet is given
free
access to the sum of all human knowledge" the wikimedia movement needs
to
prioritize translation as a regular part of key processes.
We are failing at this today. The wikimedia movement lacks a clear
strategy
to shift the cost (funds and human resources) from non-English speaking
volunteers to the broader wikimedia movement.
I welcome a hearty discussion about how the Affiliate-selected Board of
Trustee election can be made more accessible to more non-English
speaking
people. And also a larger discussion as part of the WMF Strategic Plan
discussion, and the upcoming WMf Annual Plan.
Warm regards,
Sydney
User:FloNight
Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence
at Cochrane Collaboration
Hi Sydney,
as I mentioned earlier, I am afraid there are two things mixed up here.
There a big step between making the candidate statements and answers to
questions to all individuals who are eligible to vote at the forthcoming
elections, and providing the sum of human knowledge in all languages.
In practical terms, every person who speaks Dutch and is a member of
Wikimedia Nederland / Belgium also speaks English and would be able to
understand the candidate statements. On the other hand, Dutch as a
language is spoken by 20M people, and we need of course to consider
support of Dutch Wikipedia / sister projects / Wikidata, Commons, and
Mediawiki interface with a high priority. As another example, I believe
we have zero Quechua speakers who are eligible to vote, and translating
statements into Quechuan languages would be a loss of time. On the other
hand, these languages have 9 million speakers, and definitely need their
own projects.
I agree that both should be discussed, but let us separate the things.
One issue is a global priority of languages in terms of the projects etc
and whether they need to be supported, another issue is whether there
are some languages the statements of the candidates should be urgently
translated to in order to help the voters decide.
Cheers
Yaroslav