Hello Yaroslav
Thanks for your reply.
My point is that there is no clear strategy or process for prioritizing which pages get translated. So, perhaps it is easy for some people to be mixed up.
But I'm pretty confident that I understand the issues, and I'm not getting anything mixed up. :-)
Looking at the upcoming election's pages on Meta, I see that many of the basic pages that describe the election are not translated into more than a few languages and those are not up to date.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats_election_FAQ#...
Additionally, I feel strongly that most everyone in the wikimedia movement should have the opportunity to read the candidate statements and Q&A of the future WMF Trustees. But right now we don't have anyway of making sure that even the languages of voting Chapters or thematic organizations have a good method to get it done in a timely way.
It is troubling to me that an Affiliated organization's Board needs to be proficient in English to do the translation. Not to mention that the Board members don't select the timing of this election and may have serious limitations on their time that prevents doing the translation.
This dynamic in the wikimedia movement needs to change. It is exclusionary and unwelcoming.
We can not reach the people that the wikimedia movement needs to reach if the burden of translation of these important official WMF processes a completely volunteer process.
Going forward, I would like to see the percentage of pages translated as a metric that is tracked, reported, and discussed regularly.
Warm regards, Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 10:29 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
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
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