We talk about multilingualism a lot, and about how many active languages Wikipedia has... translation of instructions for the upcoming Board elections should be a big deal. Any contributor who meets whatever criteria are set for voting, should be able to vote (and to judge the available candidates). Translation of profiles is part of this; however for smaller languages, perhaps that can wait on an explicit request from an interested voter; in which case there should be a channel for such requests.
Project-level coordinators would help quickly broaden the pool of interested translators. ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_notice_translations_2005 )
An idea for distributing the election work to users on every project: * Identify at least one respected user from each project who can oversee announcing the election, and help analyse votes from that project if necessary. For the largest projects, two or three users might be better. ** Individual communities could be asked to nominate people for this role; we could also tap the pool of international ambassadors (cf. m:Wikimedia Embassy). These users could also help coordinate translations if one was not yet available for their project language. * Add these users to a list of project-level coordinators, like the list of translators/translation coordinators above * Election Officials can work through these project-level coordinators to reach local VPs and announcement pages, and to gather questions for the central FAQ.
These project-level coordinators already have announcements to start distributing -- even the mention that elections are coming up should be translated widely.
The ideal candidates for these positions: active, longtime editors who are primarily active on the project in question. It might be nice to find such users who do not normally take part in policy or organization, and ask them to help out. (Note that just finding one voter from each project will increase the project-diversity among voters by an order of magnitude over last year).
On 4/30/05, Sj 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
Project-level coordinators would help quickly broaden the pool of interested translators. ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_notice_translations_2005 )
I realize this suggestion does not precisely address Erik's desire to have one person organizing translations of election content; but Aphaia is a pro at this, and already starting with pages like the one above.
SJ
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