Perhaps we would be better to post a link here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives
With a very short english message: "Last week's summary of foundation-l is now available. Please translate."
Then if ever someone does transalate the message that could be used in the future. Also perhaps we will round up new trnastors for the summary itself this way. I think it is important that this be done by volunteers and not bots. That way if people start asking questions someone will be wathing to try and work things out. Also if some people complain that the message is spamming a person can quickly apologize and remove that wiki from the list of places getting messages.
I don't like just posting "sensitive" messages because it is hard to tell what any one wiki will find sensitive. Not all wiki's are complaining about the sitenotice. Although the LSS is not perfect I think it is the best option for "pushing" information.
Birgitte SB
--- Teun Spaans teun.spaans@gmail.com wrote:
You might be right. I realize that posting in english is not optimal. But the present situation, where people are confronted with a change and must go hunting around to find where information has been published, has disadvantages too.
One way to work around the problem os that this "push" becomes optional, in the senese that village pumps can subscribe/unsubscribe.
teun
On 12/30/06, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:
If one would post a message to all vilage pumps in
english, I can see
the maillist flooded by messages concerning
"anglosaxism", "language
pushing", "discrimination", etc. I don't think
that would be a
solution.
Bryan
On 12/30/06, Teun Spaans teun.spaans@gmail.com
wrote:
How? - by a bot.
On the english wiki, I am a member of the
Military history
WikiProject. There is a newsletter, which
appears every monbth or two
months. All members are notified on their talk
page. By a bot. Surely,
if a project can manage this, the core of
wikimedia can mange this? I
admit, some volunteers are needed to do this.
Yes, the language is a problem. At the moment I
see no alternative to
English. Translation by babelfish gives terrible
results. At least at
start, there wont be volunteers able to
translate it. You are right
that the next complaint will be that the message
is in english. When
we have taken this step, and the complaint
comes, we can invite them
to translate it.
One of the problems with the current
communication is that we rely a
lot on "pull", not on "push". The information is
posted somewhere, and
it is left to the wikipedians to visiti these
places frequently and
read it. It is up to the wikipedians to discover
these places. It is
up to the wikipedians to go to these places
frequently. It is up to
the wikipedians to read them It is up to the
wikipedians to act on it.
This holds true for communication from the
foundation. This is true
for information from the local chapters. This is
true for information
from commons, such as deletions. It is true for
policy changes on
commons.
There is no information brought to the door. I
think it might be time
to change all this. We might start about
thinking delivering selected
information to the people on their talk pages.
information in the
village pumps.
I dont say we should communicate everything to
everyone, but we may
start thinking about such a change in our
communication strategy.
We are already communicating to the outside
world based on "push".
When the english wiki reaches it n-th million
article, whap, out goes
a press release. The same for commons: when the
1 million images
milestone was reached. We dont wait till the
media visit our sites to
discover it, we go out and tell them. It wouldnt be bad when we followed the same line
internally.
teun
On 12/30/06, Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/30/06, Teun Spaans
teun.spaans@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps a bot posting sensitive messages
into every village pump, simply in
english, would be a solution.
How? It would work somewhere. It wouldn't work
in other places. If we
care the entire community, it is not the way
we are going to,
regretfully I admit that is roughly what we
are doing though.
Principally I have find no difference between
communications via
sitenotice and ones via VP.
On non-English projects, speically non
Indo-European language
projects, I have seen some (important to some
extent) messages posted
in English and left without comment. In this
way the possiblity of
translation doesn't depend on its importance
but genuinly availability
of volunteering translators. The next possible
complaint would be "why
it came in English but not in our language?"
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