On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 20:27:08 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer elian@djini.de wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
This may be a good time to rethink our approach to Meta. Currently there is just one big, messy Meta-Wiki, with neither particularly clear policies (although my CPOV draft attempts to remedy this to some extent) nor interlanguage links.
That was true a few weeks ago, but things have changed:
- Patrick is moving the complete User's guide into the help namespace
- there is a clear category system on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/Meta:Categories which permits to find the important pages
- more cleanup ongoing
The proportion of non-en to en text on meta is steadily increasing, particularly since meta-de: texts are regularly appearing, and since there is a growing group of multilingual contributors actively translating important pages.
Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.
I agree Meta should be the first place these interface issues are fixed, even the spur to get them fixed. Since it has the largest concentration of single-wiki multilingual editors, and no history of being separated, it will be an ideal testing grounds -- before attempting something heroic like a merging of all wiktionary projects.
I agree with mav. In the german chapter we thought about setting up an own wiki for the chapter but in the end we decided to use meta to avoid balkanization and to facilitate cooperation.
Thank you for this. It is always encouraging to see a rash of german-language edits appearing on Meta-RC, or to find a key policy-suggestion page which needs translation *into* english.
=== On translations ===
My thoughts:
- our representation for visitors (the WMF website) should be multilingual
yes.
- the most important pages on meta should be translated (we don't have
the capacities to translate everything)
Yes. (and we will someday have the capacity; there are currently hundreds of [[m:Translators]] with some interest in translation, and perhaps a thousand real policy pageds on meta)
- we should accept that we need a working language (english) for wikimedia
Perhaps someday that can be expanded to a few working languages, all of which will be actively intertranslated?
- pages in other languages should contain english abstracts
- pages in english can have abstracts in other languages
Yes, I like the way this is done currently on some german pages.
In my opinion, it's an illusion that participation in wikimedia affairs is possible without a basic knowledge of English. People should have the possibility to inform themselves about the goings-on, but it makes no sense f.e. to translate the german preparations for the Linuxtag Lörrach into spanish.
It should absolutely be possible for people to participate in wikimedia affairs without a /good/ knowledge of English.. That this is not true today is an artefact of where Wikimedia grew up and attracted its first editors.
As we improve the efficiency of distributing translations among many people, and of overseeing the translation workflow (which pages translated into how many different languages, at what level of development and with signoff by which high-fluency proofreaders), it will become easier for people with little knowledge of English to contribute and participate.
sj<