On 25/01/2008, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Jan 23, 2008 9:42 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
What resources are you speaking of?
Any kind of resources. The fundraising video would have us expecting WMF to be somehow spending money on the native languages of the developing world in the future. How should that money best be spent? Part of the answer depends on knowing the impact of languages.
Part (and *only* part), but since we don't have six squabillion dollars, we will never get to the end of the list that enables 99.999% of the literate world to contribute. Since we have the equivalent of spare change found down the back of the couch we can pick a much less contentious number like 70% and still not go close to reaching it.
Volunteer resources? If so, I find the question fairly moot, as we can't really "require" anything.
Common misconception. You know better, think about it for a bit. We can exert pressure in all sorts of ways even in our existing volunteer systems. Consider commons, "To be featured an image's description must be translated into at least three languages, including at least two from this list". That would have a clear impact on common's accessibility to people of many languages.
Limited accessibility, yes. I don't see how we can dangle a carrot to get people to translate policy or help pages though.
Even without stuffing it in as a requirement having clear information about the impact of supporting other languages will allow us to make a better argument to the volunteers, and providing that will hopefully shift their priorities a little.
Going beyond that, other heavily volunteer organizations are quite able to set clear goals and achieve them. That we are somewhat broken in that regard doesn't mean we will never get better, or shouldn't get better.
I set a goal for POTY to have complete translations and committee language contacts for all the natural languages of the top 15 Wikipedias (which at the time were also all the Wikipedias with > 100,000 articles, since then Romanian and Catalan have snuck into this list). We did pretty well, although there was a lot of cajoling from me as the end of the year drew closer. Norsk (bokmål) (no:) was the only one that didn't really get there in terms of translation completion. That was 13 languages other than English, and that was quite difficult. I would like to see us have consistent, solid results for that set (or a similar one) before tackling any other dozens of languages.
It's also useful to note the difference between material intended for within the Wikimedia community (WMF info, election info, policies) and that of external (fundraising, maybe some basic website info). For material intended for the Wikimedia community it makes sense to prioritise the language list according to projects listed by number of users. [If someone has a better metric like active users in the last X months then maybe use that instead.]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Wikimedia_Projects_by_Size sorted by users:
1 en.wikipedia 2 es.wikipedia 3 de.wikipedia 4 zh.wikipedia 5 fr.wikipedia 6 pt.wikipedia commons.wikimedia 7 it.wikipedia 8 ja.wikipedia 9 pl.wikipedia 10 nl.wikipedia 11 tr.wikipedia 12 ar.wikipedia 13 ru.wikipedia en.wikibooks 14 fa.wikipedia 15 fi.wikipedia 16 no.wikipedia 17 vi.wikipedia 18 id.wikipedia 19 sv.wikipedia en.wiktionary 20 he.wikipedia
Now that's a list that is pretty different to the languages of the top 20 Wikipedias.
Anyway, my point is that it will be decades before we need the answer to your original question, since we are still struggling on this basic kind of measure, which makes me wonder what the point of the discussion is besides a flamefest.
cheers Brianna