When translating the fundraiser 2008 announcement, I had again the impression that Wikimedia announcements are suitable for the context of English language, maybe a handful of other languages and their Wikipedia communities, but not for lesser resourced languages like Latin, Swahili or Dutch Low Saxon.
First, it is often a large amount of text that needs hours or longer to translate. The workforce of small Wikipedia communities is limited, and the result is often that announcements are not translated and distributed at all. It is also a problem that e.g. the fundraising message referred to the Annual Report of WMF, which exists only in English or a limited number of languages.
Second, the contenct of the announcements is directed to speakers of a language which is the main language of thoses speakers, or a language taught at ordinary schools and universities etc.
Third, the Wikipedia/Wikimedia structure can differ, like the existence and strengh of a Wikimedia chapter.
It might be considerable to have in future Wikimedia announcements in various sizes, like L, M and S. Then, a Wikipedia language edition community can choose which one to adopt.
Ziko van Dijk
2008/10/27 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com:
When translating the fundraiser 2008 announcement, I had again the impression that Wikimedia announcements are suitable for the context of English language, maybe a handful of other languages and their Wikipedia communities, but not for lesser resourced languages like Latin, Swahili or Dutch Low Saxon.
First, it is often a large amount of text that needs hours or longer to translate. The workforce of small Wikipedia communities is limited, and the result is often that announcements are not translated and distributed at all. It is also a problem that e.g. the fundraising message referred to the Annual Report of WMF, which exists only in English or a limited number of languages.
Second, the contenct of the announcements is directed to speakers of a language which is the main language of thoses speakers, or a language taught at ordinary schools and universities etc.
Third, the Wikipedia/Wikimedia structure can differ, like the existence and strengh of a Wikimedia chapter.
It might be considerable to have in future Wikimedia announcements in various sizes, like L, M and S. Then, a Wikipedia language edition community can choose which one to adopt.
That might be a good idea. An alternative would be for the local communities to summarise announcements themselves, that way they can be sure to include the parts that are most relevant to that community. (Some announcements will lend themselves to such summaries more than others.)
2008/10/27 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com:
It might be considerable to have in future Wikimedia announcements in various sizes, like L, M and S. Then, a Wikipedia language edition community can choose which one to adopt.
It would help, I think, if we would associate certain processes with these levels of importance, e.g.:
* high importance: announcement in meta site-notice, posting on foundation-l and translators-l, biweekly updates on translators-l * medium importance: posting on translators-l * low importance: add language link examples to document & purely rely on self-organization to achieve translations.
For projects like the survey, we've effectively already followed the "high importance" process above.
Separately, it remains the case that coordinating translations is a very serious, dedicated piece of work. If the organization could afford it, it would be lovely to have a full-time translation coordinator who worries about no other problem. As is, we've on a case-by-case basis allocated staff time to coordinate translations, and relied on some very active volunteers (yay Casey!) to help throughout the process.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org