On Jan 23, 2008 9:42 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/01/2008, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
There are more kinds of resources that need to be allocated than simply turning on Wikis, which is why understanding the payoff is important.
For example, on a multi-lingual project like Commons it might be a reasonable requirement that all policies, featured image descriptions, etc be translated into the top N languages at a minimum. Requiring translations into hundreds of languages would be a impressive waste of resources. By knowing the tradeoffs we can make better decisions.
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.
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.
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.