On 18/10/2007, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
You know... I would be interested in knowing more about how daily work is handled with regards to multilingual situation, and if there are specific issues that non english raise and are still unsolved.
A really big problem is the category one. We have a policy to only use English categories, because category redirects don't "work" properly (putting an image in one cat that redirects to another doesn't make the image available in the other cat). I think nobody is really happy with the solution, but no better one has been found to date.
A secondary problem is that of templates, although we have {{pd-self}} and {{pd-self/ru}} if you have Russian interface the Russian one doesn't "magically" show up, unfortunately. Also we use a template {{information}} to store license,author etc info about each file, and we don't really have a good way to let users use an equivalent in another language.
For image descriptions, we have little templates that mark the language, like {{en|description in english}} {{de|...}} {{fr|...}} {{zh|...}}
We have just started a bit of a drive to use these more (esp. English ones are often not used) and from that we can derive things like "find all images that are missing a description in language X". So in a few more years I can imagine that will be quite impressive. At the moment Picture of the Day often has around 15 or 20 different language descriptions. It will be good if that is extended to, say, Quality Images.
Although we try to be "multilingual" I am sad to say I don't think everyone can participate on an equal footing regardless of which language they speak. I think most policy and administration discussion occurs in English.
For participating in processes like deletion, I think you could go pretty well without using English -- if someone had come before you and done the necessary translation. The actual process if pretty automated, and I think we have done pretty well at inculclating the value that "anyone can participate here with any language". So a request in Russian might not get processed too quickly but the user at least won't be commanded to write in English.
In requests for adminship I think we look very happily on multilingual candidates and if you happen to speak a language that we don't yet have an admin for, it's really not too hard to have success. :)
Then I suppose there is the general "cultural" thing where interacting with someone who speaks English as a second language... and I sometimes wonder "this is really dramatic, I wonder if that is intentional?" So that's another element where you have to make "assume good faith" your mantra.
Anyway, it would be more interesting to hear about this from the perspective of a non-native-English-speaker's perspective. :)
With regards to the developers request, hopefully, if the fundraising goes well, your wish should be answered. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings Several new positions are planned with regards to developers.
Yes, I sincerely hope so :)
cheers, Brianna