michael west said:
> A board seat for a representative of indigenous
non English speakers would Ipresume only represent a member of the Celtic language
speakers. The facts are that non-indigenous people who contribute to the WMF who speak
languagesat home or in prayer outweigh those whose languages are official languages of the
UK. It just seems bizarre.
The reason why I think Wikimedia UK should focus more on, say, Sottish Gaelic with its
50,000 speakers than, say German, with its 500,000 speakers in the UK, is that we already
have a German chapter which can promote German language projects. We are the only chapter
which could ever promote Scottish Gaelic, and, as I said before, we may be able to unlock
public funds in order to do so. I don't remotely agree that this is racist.
There is clearly a danger that Wikimedia UK will end up just being Wikipedia London;
recognising the diversity of UK Wikimedians - across projects, languages and the
constituent countries, would I think be a positive step.
My suggestion of 2 had in mind a board of around seven. Of course it would be fewer if
there were fewer board seats.
From: Andrew Turvey <raturvey(a)yahoo.co.uk>
To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Saturday, 29 November, 2008 0:40:35
Subject: Re: Election Rules (non-english speakers)
Q5: Is there any way that you think the election should be run differently to the election
of the interim Board?
I wanted to answer one of the questions I put with a suggestion regarding minority
languages.
Most of the people active in Wikimedia UK seem to be active in the english Wikimedia
projects. However, there are some other smaller Wikimedia languages where UK editors form
a vital part of the editing and readorship base. I'm thinking particularly of the
native languages of the UK such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and maybe Irish, Scots/Ullans,
Cornish, Manx etc.
As well as recognised the diversity of the Wikimedia community, there are also significant
public funds available for promoting these languages which could be used by us to support
these projects.
The Board has already reached out to these projects by asking if the newsletter could be
translated into these languages. My suggestion is we set aside two reserved seats on the
Board for people who actively contribute to at lease one wikimedia project in a minority
language of the UK.
What do you think?