michael west said:
>> A board seat for a representative of indigenous non English speakers would I
presume only represent a member of the Celtic language speakers. The facts are that non-indigenous people who contribute to the WMF who speak languages
at 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@yahoo.co.uk>
To: wikimediauk-l@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?