Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
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.
I think I already said it, but I will repeat then :-) I was really glad you move the chapter things to meta.
I'd like to have a setting to switch the interface to german to make german meta-contributors feel more at home, but there's no need for separate wikis and zillion of translation pages. My thoughts:
- our representation for visitors (the WMF website) should be multilingual
- the most important pages on meta should be translated (we don't have
the capacities to translate everything)
- we should accept that we need a working language (english) for wikimedia
- pages in other languages should contain english abstracts
- pages in english can have abstracts in other languages
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. On the other hand, the spanish people should be able to see that there are preparations done and ask the germans for experiences and tipps for a congress in Spain. If everything was done in separate wikis, they would probably not realize it.
greetings, elia n
You are totally correct on this.