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