[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia sidebar box for wikipedia.org

[Erik Moeller]

On 9/28/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> What doesn't work about it?

Let's start with the most obvious bit: WMF is an international
organization, and we want volunteers to contribute as many
translations as possible of key pages on the WMF wiki, no matter how
few there are of them. When you have 100 languages, 5 pages
effectively equates to 500 pages that need to be updated and kept in
sync. Besides requiring better translation tools, it requires enough
volunteers to have access in a preferably permission-free or
permission-weak model to do the work.

Now, there are of course issues with volunteer translations: Can you
trust a random guy not to say in Arabic that Wikimedia is deeply
inspired by the Quran in its mission and scope? Possibly not, but
hopefully you can at least trust someone from a chapter to validate
that information, and have a disclaimer on it when it hasn't been
checked.

Beyond key, relatively static pages, I do believe we need a single
place for official news from the Foundation, and I'm not just talking
about press releases, but also general updates on what we are doing.
It's fine if those news are prepared on Meta or wherever, but there is
a distinction between news that come from a random wiki somewhere, and
news that have been officially validated to be accurate. With regard
to translations, the current events page on WMF wiki lists exactly 3
other languages besides English. 2 of them are out of date.

The notion of using a CMS instead of a wiki has been brought up. I
don't believe that is the way to go, since it seems to me that we are
building the tools we need to build a better WMF website anyway in the
process of improving our other sites.

-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.