Hoi, When 50% or our editors have English language skills it is certainly helpful but it is not necessarily a good thing. It means that we are failing in our efforts to get more editors who do not have English language skills. While all the other languages get 57% of the edits we still have no studies on these other languages. We still do not know what makes a difference for these other languages. We still do not know the effect of the current lack of support for most of our languages. For most of our languages we do not even have the 500 most used messages localised !!
When you look at the self assessment that people give themselves at translatewiki.net, you will find that many people do not rate their competency level in English as really good but these are the people who localise MediaWiki and who determine the usability of the user interface in their language. Given that as part of the internationalisation effort, the English language messages are checked by the developers at translatewiki.netand are often improved, you can appreciate that not only are most localisation incomplete but there is also a need for proof reading and improving the existing localisations.
In his reply Michael mentioned a need for the translation in to other languages and I certainly agree that there is a need for spreading the information we have as widely as possible. As important is learning what the important issues are in the projects in other languages. As there are no studies about this, we only assume that "these things will sort themselves out". Sometimes they do, but I am convinced that we would do much better for our "other" languages when they are given equal attention.
When 57% of our edits are in other languages, it would follow that equal attention would be much more then what it is today. Given the current structure of the WMF organisation there will always be a bias for English and much of the dissemination of information will remain mainly in English. Support for the projects in other languages can be given more importance. There are many things that can be done to achieve much more. Some technical and some organisational. There are plenty low hanging fruits but they will only be picked when language support is given a priority. Thanks, GerardM
2009/4/30 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 7:18 AM, syrcro@gmx.de wrote:
Most WMF-Wiki contributors have none or only fair English language
skills.
[[citation needed]] ;-)
I absolutely agree that WMF should continue its multilingual efforts and I consider our ability to produce so many language variants as one of our great strengths. That said, I suspect that greater than 50% of the editing community actually has decent English skills.
I'd base this supposition on two observations. One, the English language projects collectively have received 43% of all edits to all WMF projects (most of this is the English Wikipedia, of course). Secondly, even for people that primarily work in other languages, a significant fraction are likely to know English as a supplemental language. According to Wikipedia, roughly 1 in 10 people whose native tongue is not English will also know how to speak English, and I would argue that the demographics of the WMF crowd (e.g. skewed towards educated, tech savvy, first world types) would drive that ratio even higher than that.
So, putting those details together, I suspect that a majority of edits are in fact made by someone who is either working in English or would be capable of communicating in English if they needed to.be reached that way. By extension, I would suggest that around 50% of the WMF editing community is English capable.
Obviously these are crude numbers, but I think they serve as a reminder of the huge role that English plays in the WMF projects (some might even say a disproportionate role).
Of course, even if my rough argument is true, I would not want to disenfranchise the many thousands of active contributors in the other 50% or disadvantage the many smaller projects, so such arguments should not be a detriment to our translation efforts. If anything, perhaps they should be a cause for concern and an impetus to further develop other language communities so that they come to more adequately reflect the distribution of languages in the world at large.
-Robert Rohde
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