Virgilio A. P. Machado wrote:
Marc, you comment is not very optimistic, but it was a great incentive to do what I announced above. Hopefully others will be more encouraged to voice their ideas about other matters, knowing they'll find a friendly hear and some useful and very welcome feedback.
Marc and I just happen to come from a generation of grumpy old men who have never had enough good sense to abandon our principles. If you do that long enough the optimism can suffer until you can pull yourself off the carpet and try again.
I'm glad to find Nathan in a better mood this time :-). Of course language is a problem. This is indeed a very interesting problem that I hope has a solution in the international wikipedian community. That is also an obstacle to getting on greater detail in this list since most of its members would not be able to verify and cross check that information.
The Foundation can't afford to let a Wikipedia on some obscure language (that is not the case of Portuguese) to run wild and be run by some mob. At some time a flag will go up. What then? I could offer some suggestions, but I was hoping that you all would come up with some useful and tested procedures.
It's unrealistic to expect those who do not speak your language to solve the problems. Just because the anglophones happen to be hanging from the top of the Tower of Babel does not imply that they have any greater expertise. I am willing to concede that the behaviour on some obscure language projects is nothing short of outrageous. How do you determine what the Foundation can or can't afford? Being able to deal with the problems requires for the community to have a critical membership mass. The Foundation can't demand other solutions without compromising NPOV and individual responsibility. If there are specific problems in a project, and nobody knows about them, nothing can be done.
I'm afraid to have to admit that the lack of interest and advice that I got, so far, covers both list and off-list. I wish that would change, again not only for the present case, but what kind of message is this sending to others? How sure can we all be that there aren't or there would not be other cases in the future?
The lack of interest is no surprise. Why would anyone with an already full plate of problems want to take on a new one? You can never be sure that there will be no other cases in the future.
Quite frankly, I would rather be wrong (not a very palatable prospect) but give others the assurance that their voices will be heard, than letting them remember the story of this guy from "somewhere" who blew the whistle and nobody cared.
Preferring to be wrong is very altruistic in an environment where most are desperate to be right, and to win. You don't have to worry about them remembering that nobody cared when they never acknowledge that someone was blowing the whistle in the first place.
Ec
Behavior on many projects IS outrageous; when someone complains the response is almost universally that the foundation doesn't get involved in local project business.
Mark
skype: node.ue
On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Ray Saintongesaintonge@telus.net wrote:
Virgilio A. P. Machado wrote:
Marc, you comment is not very optimistic, but it was a great incentive to do what I announced above. Hopefully others will be more encouraged to voice their ideas about other matters, knowing they'll find a friendly hear and some useful and very welcome feedback.
Marc and I just happen to come from a generation of grumpy old men who have never had enough good sense to abandon our principles. If you do that long enough the optimism can suffer until you can pull yourself off the carpet and try again.
I'm glad to find Nathan in a better mood this time :-). Of course language is a problem. This is indeed a very interesting problem that I hope has a solution in the international wikipedian community. That is also an obstacle to getting on greater detail in this list since most of its members would not be able to verify and cross check that information.
The Foundation can't afford to let a Wikipedia on some obscure language (that is not the case of Portuguese) to run wild and be run by some mob. At some time a flag will go up. What then? I could offer some suggestions, but I was hoping that you all would come up with some useful and tested procedures.
It's unrealistic to expect those who do not speak your language to solve the problems. Just because the anglophones happen to be hanging from the top of the Tower of Babel does not imply that they have any greater expertise. I am willing to concede that the behaviour on some obscure language projects is nothing short of outrageous. How do you determine what the Foundation can or can't afford? Being able to deal with the problems requires for the community to have a critical membership mass. The Foundation can't demand other solutions without compromising NPOV and individual responsibility. If there are specific problems in a project, and nobody knows about them, nothing can be done.
I'm afraid to have to admit that the lack of interest and advice that I got, so far, covers both list and off-list. I wish that would change, again not only for the present case, but what kind of message is this sending to others? How sure can we all be that there aren't or there would not be other cases in the future?
The lack of interest is no surprise. Why would anyone with an already full plate of problems want to take on a new one? You can never be sure that there will be no other cases in the future.
Quite frankly, I would rather be wrong (not a very palatable prospect) but give others the assurance that their voices will be heard, than letting them remember the story of this guy from "somewhere" who blew the whistle and nobody cared.
Preferring to be wrong is very altruistic in an environment where most are desperate to be right, and to win. You don't have to worry about them remembering that nobody cared when they never acknowledge that someone was blowing the whistle in the first place.
Ec
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