Since yesterday, smaller languages have been removed from the multilingual links displayed on the Commons' Main Page. Most removed languages are languages with a smaller Wikipedia community, like Arabic, Indonesian, Welsh, Danish, Korean, Romanian, Russian, Vietnamese, Turkish, but a few larger languages, like Spanish, Japanese or Swedish have been removed too.
I cannot spend my time reverting the page, so I ask for your help.
The initiator of the change contends that the communities he punishes have not been quick enough to update the page in their language. To this I object that he did not seriously take contact with these communities and ask them in a polite manner to perform the updates he wishes.
Do you think imposing smaller languages the same pace as that of the larger ones is fair ?
Couldn't we have, like in sports different categories (junior, senior, men, women seldom compete in the same categories in sports) with expectations and rules differentiated in function of the size of a language community ?
Do you think a regime of the bigger boys on the block punishing the smaller ones is what we need on a Wikimedia project ?
Hoi, This seems to be yet another fine mess that the Commons crowd is getting itself into. The question is when will they learn that they are serving the other projects and that their good intentions have resulted in projects NOT adopting Commons because of the fiendly cooperation as it is perceived.
What do they think they achieve by doing this? Is this in the interest of the projects? Is this the considered opinion of the Commons community or is it a solitary excercise? It is indeed a great way of creating more hostility.
Thanks, GerardM
On 5/4/06, folengo@netcourrier.com folengo@netcourrier.com wrote:
Since yesterday, smaller languages have been removed from the multilingual links displayed on the Commons' Main Page. Most removed languages are languages with a smaller Wikipedia community, like Arabic, Indonesian, Welsh, Danish, Korean, Romanian, Russian, Vietnamese, Turkish, but a few larger languages, like Spanish, Japanese or Swedish have been removed too.
I cannot spend my time reverting the page, so I ask for your help.
The initiator of the change contends that the communities he punishes have not been quick enough to update the page in their language. To this I object that he did not seriously take contact with these communities and ask them in a polite manner to perform the updates he wishes.
Do you think imposing smaller languages the same pace as that of the larger ones is fair ?
Couldn't we have, like in sports different categories (junior, senior, men, women seldom compete in the same categories in sports) with expectations and rules differentiated in function of the size of a language community ?
Do you think a regime of the bigger boys on the block punishing the smaller ones is what we need on a Wikimedia project ?
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
GerardM napisału:
Hoi, This seems to be yet another fine mess that the Commons crowd is getting itself into. The question is when will they learn that they are serving the other projects and that their good intentions have resulted in projects NOT adopting Commons because of the fiendly cooperation as it is perceived.
What do they think they achieve by doing this? Is this in the interest of the projects? Is this the considered opinion of the Commons community or is it a solitary excercise? It is indeed a great way of creating more hostility.
Thanks, GerardM
It was a solitary decision by Arnomane. He does raise a good point - "it does harm severely the up to date localised pages if you need to search them between lots of other links, others are still accessible directly" - there is a link to "other languages" at the end of the language list, so nothing is lost, really, just made less prominent, although I think that making the links to more up-to-date languages bigger and the other ones smaller would probably be a better idea.
Paweł Dembowski wrote:
GerardM napisału:
Hoi, This seems to be yet another fine mess that the Commons crowd is getting itself into. The question is when will they learn that they are serving the other projects and that their good intentions have resulted in projects NOT adopting Commons because of the fiendly cooperation as it is perceived.
What do they think they achieve by doing this? Is this in the interest of the projects? Is this the considered opinion of the Commons community or is it a solitary excercise? It is indeed a great way of creating more hostility.
Thanks, GerardM
It was a solitary decision by Arnomane. He does raise a good point - "it does harm severely the up to date localised pages if you need to search them between lots of other links, others are still accessible directly" - there is a link to "other languages" at the end of the language list, so nothing is lost, really, just made less prominent, although I think that making the links to more up-to-date languages bigger and the other ones smaller would probably be a better idea.
Hoi, Does it really ? When you are looking for information, and you are looking for it in your language, you do not care if the information is correct in Dutch Farsi Russian Chinese German or French when you do not read those languages. When you insist on making some languages less prominent, by inference the people who use these languages are less prominent. There is a word for it ..
It is abundantly true that we need better support for the localisation of our project and of our software. There is a subcommittee that deals with communication and translation. I am sure that they were consulted before these punitive measures were enacted.
Thanks, GerardM
That tiny '+...' link for "all languages" is not ideal either.
Arbeo
On 5/4/06, folengo@netcourrier.com folengo@netcourrier.com wrote:
Since yesterday, smaller languages have been removed from the multilingual links displayed on the Commons' Main Page. Most removed languages are languages with a smaller Wikipedia community, like Arabic, Indonesian, Welsh, Danish, Korean, Romanian, Russian, Vietnamese, Turkish, but a few larger languages, like Spanish, Japanese or Swedish have been removed too.
I cannot spend my time reverting the page, so I ask for your help.
The initiator of the change contends that the communities he punishes have not been quick enough to update the page in their language. To this I object that he did not seriously take contact with these communities and ask them in a polite manner to perform the updates he wishes.
Do you think imposing smaller languages the same pace as that of the larger ones is fair ?
Couldn't we have, like in sports different categories (junior, senior, men, women seldom compete in the same categories in sports) with expectations and rules differentiated in function of the size of a language community ?
Do you think a regime of the bigger boys on the block punishing the smaller ones is what we need on a Wikimedia project ?
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I'm not sure why this needs to be discussed on foundation-l. The relevant page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Lang-mp&action=h...
There doesn't seem to have been much discussion about this yet.
On 5/4/06, folengo@netcourrier.com folengo@netcourrier.com wrote:
Do you think imposing smaller languages the same pace as that of the larger ones is fair ?
That depends on the changes which are asked for. If it's about updating the pic of the day, then it only takes one or two dedicated individuals to do that. When you have a low number of required updates per day, update frequency is actually a fairly unbiased criterion of comparing languages, as opposed to the article count we use on Wikipedia to determine visibility of language links.
If the update conditions are clearly defined, reasonable, and applied fairly and consistently to restore or remove links, it doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
Erik
On 5/4/06, folengo@netcourrier.com folengo@netcourrier.com wrote:
Since yesterday, smaller languages have been removed from the multilingual links displayed on the Commons' Main Page. Most removed languages are languages with a smaller Wikipedia community, like Arabic, Indonesian, Welsh, Danish, Korean, Romanian, Russian, Vietnamese, Turkish, but a few larger languages, like Spanish, Japanese or Swedish have been removed too.
I cannot spend my time reverting the page, so I ask for your help.
The initiator of the change contends that the communities he punishes have not been quick enough to update the page in their language. To this I object that he did not seriously take contact with these communities and ask them in a polite manner to perform the updates he wishes.
Do you think imposing smaller languages the same pace as that of the larger ones is fair ?
Couldn't we have, like in sports different categories (junior, senior, men, women seldom compete in the same categories in sports) with expectations and rules differentiated in function of the size of a language community ?
Who would have ever thought I would actually agree with Teofilo on anything? :-)
While I believe I see the reasoning about getting rid of the "smaller" languages on the main page, while I understand the problem of having outdated main pages, I totally agree that smaller languages should not be penalized in accessing commons.
I am not going to argue that Mediawiki is not fit for a multilingual website today, although that is probably the primary problem of commons.
This said, I believe that a mid-way can be found.
How about launching a massive translation rally (A translsation of the week maybe?) of Commons main page that would translate in smaller languages a "default" type of main page that does not need to be updated?
I am thinking a page that states the purpose of commons, displays pic of the week and media of the week and maybe a disclaimer that says that English is the default language for current policies and such, please refer to it to understand how commons work. Nothing fancy, but at least with the main important pages (even in English) displayed and the useful links.
Cheers,
Delphine
-- ~notafish
Aah, I believe I succeeded in tracking the right direction now,
On 5/4/06, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
This said, I believe that a mid-way can be found.
How about launching a massive translation rally (A translsation of the week maybe?) of Commons main page that would translate in smaller languages a "default" type of main page that does not need to be updated?
Good idea. Not completely, but it has been already applied to the Foundation website. Some languages (eh, or only English now?) are updated more frequently than other languages, and some languages updated rarely, like Korean, were removed sections which needs frequent updating.
For languages whose editors are hard to avail quickly, it is helpful to set a page which contains minimum required information - even stats would be a potential cause of aches for those languages. But after all, a mite is infinitely valuable than void.
While I believe I see the reasoning about getting rid of the "smaller" languages on the main page, while I understand the problem of having outdated main pages, I totally agree that smaller languages should not be penalized in accessing commons.
*nod*
As a P&T member, I daresay it would be a strategic loss to remove big languages like Spanish / Japanese, whose projects are steadly growing and many speakers of them are involved into the project, or just are frequent visitors.
I admit it is a problem to have a start page poorly maintained, but a shabby main page in their own languages are far better than splendid main page written in a language they can hardly read. And again, I'd like you to be aware there are some languages which fairly activated projects with a huge number of pageview but poorly involved into the so-called grobal activities of Wikimedia project - plainly activities of English speaker both native and as foreign/second.
Besides those practical reasons, we could pay attention to emotional aspects. Small languages' editors and visitors once removed would feel dissapointment, sadness, disrespect or just anger. Addition is normally no problem at that time: but removal has often caused a raged, or at least negative reaction as far as I have experienced on this problem.
Some of us can be recalled Hebrew Wikipedia past preferences to restrict interlangs. They had their reasons, but its effect was, in my opinion, disasterous rather than inpragmatic; some good editors were raged and declaired their entire quitting from the project, even their mother langue's. Later He people changed their mind and hostile between them and other some editors dissapeared. I think this episode has its moral stil now.
I am not going to argue that Mediawiki is not fit for a multilingual website today, although that is probably the primary problem of commons.
So as meta, but it needs much more time and powerful hands of developers to resolve.
-- Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org