Translation for french people

Erik propose de faire une collection de sous domaines pour meta. Il soutient que nous serons plus efficace dans notre collaboration globale en b�n�ficiant d'un sous site personnel, chacun restant d�sormais bien gentillement dans son domaine perso. Les pages de d�cision et r�gles communes pourront �tre traduites.

Anthere n'est pas d'accord et pr�f�rerait que le language de l'interface puisse �tre choisi dans les pr�f�rences, et un syst�me de navigation entre langues mis au point.

Erik Moeller wrote:

Anthere-

...

Meta is the only place where we can really meet, and

find information

...

that someone else left.

Can you give me a single example where splitting

Meta by subdomain would

do any harm in bringing people together? I would

like to move this

discussion from the general, emotional "Don't split

us up!" to the

specific, rational "This is where it would cause

problems" level. What

recent policy discussion or vote would have been

harmed by this approach?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership_fees and related pages A lot of it was the result of online discussions, more by email, and more on meta. I cannot really figure spreading the result of these on 150 subwikis, and I cannot really figure following discussion about it on 150 subwikis either. A central place is the only option.

A central place where everyone is allowed to give his opinion.

Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an

example. The whole

discussion was mostly English as was the voting

page. If we used

subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that

the page be

translated into the main languages before we vote.

We could have

aggregated the votes from the different language

Wikimedias so that each

community could express their preferences in their

language. We could have

translated important arguments from the discussion

in realtime (in the

form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for

example).

We could have

Did we ?

This is a lot better than having a single page with

the occasional piece

of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple

of participants. In

that case, the main part of the page is English -

excluding those who

don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion

are not - excluding

those who don't speak that language. It's a

lose-lose situation.

Spreading the discussion in 150 subwikis is the lose-lose situation.

...

In my experience, it does bring people together,

provided that you

...

welcome the interaction.

I can't interact with someone whose language I do

not speak, unless

someone translates it for me. A Wikipedia-style

setup facilitates that.

No. You will not be able to interact with the others in both cases, but in the current case, you will at least see that they make effort to communicate. Or you at least give them the opportunity to try. When they are parked in a submetawiki, you will not even know they tried to communicate.

...

Plus, there are japanese and chinese people

currently over there. We

...

have Tomos, Suisui, Britty etc...

Exactly - the people on Meta are mostly the ones who

speak some amount of

English. Someone who doesn't speak any English won't

even understand the

user interface.

Correct. Then what about fixing the interface so that we could choose the interface language ? This would be the win-win situation, not packing people in another place.

We could also find a way to navigate between languages.

...

This is what is happening on the multinlingual

mailing lists, because

...

each time someone DARE putting a word in a language

different than

...

english, he is severely told that "of course, he

could write in english,

...

because really, no one can understand him".

First, I must remind you that my main objection in

the last debate on this

matter was using a different language in order to

exclude others from a

certain comment. This is a completely separate

issue, and I would have the

same objection on Meta.

Second, if you want to reach the *largest number* of

people, you should

either use English or make sure that what you say

gets translated into

English. That should be very obvious, no? It would

be helpful if you could

acknowledge this simple point.

I acknowledge this point.

But this is not a valid argument to technically separate people.

This is about giving non-English projects a larger

voice instead of

relying on multilingual people like you to act as

mouthpieces for those

who don't speak English.

Ah, the mouthpiece is back :-) You have not been much on meta and mediawiki these days Erik. Or you would have seen that now two french people are now part of the developers, and on meta, people like Villy, Looxix, Yann just to cite a few, are very regularly participating. And we definitly do not always agree. They participate to wikimedia wide issues by being on *common* mailing list, and *common meta*. Park us on separate meta, and on separate mailing list, our interaction with you all will stop.

It just make no sense to try to maintain most pages on meta in 150 languages. What makes our force is to make them together. It would be great that they are translated, and I intend to have a french version of the wikimediafoundation website the more I can. However, there are just not enough people interested to do the translation. This is a structural issue we can not go against, however hard we try.

Just like there is a Wikipedia community for

every language, there should be a Wikimedia

community for each. Once you

have something like ja.wikimedia.org, the creation

of a Japanese Wikimedia

chapter becomes more likely as well because people

will find it far easier

to interact when there is no constant interference

by what is *effectively

indistinguishable from random noise* to them. The

problem of creating

project-wide policies is addressed through board

review and voting

standards.

It may be a good idea to put this issue to a

Wikimedia-wide vote if we

fail to reach consensus.

Regards,

Erik

Ah voting !

Yes, sure.

Well, you are welcome :-) But I would be happy that this vote is not a 3 days sampling this time, but really a wikimedia-wide vote. With say 1 month of discussion, translation of all relevant argument in all major languages, and at least 2 week long vote.

My, this would really be a major decision for our future as a global community. It deserves that.

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