[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Commons reaches 2 million files

[Brianna Laugher]

On 18/10/2007, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You know... I would be interested in knowing more about how daily work
> is handled with regards to multilingual situation, and if there are
> specific issues that non english raise and are still unsolved.

A really big problem is the category one. We have a policy to only use
English categories, because category redirects don't "work" properly
(putting an image in one cat that redirects to another doesn't make
the image available in the other cat). I think nobody is really happy
with the solution, but no better one has been found to date.

A secondary problem is that of templates, although we have {{pd-self}}
and {{pd-self/ru}} if you have Russian interface the Russian one
doesn't "magically" show up, unfortunately. Also we use a template
{{information}} to store license,author etc info about each file, and
we don't really have a good way to let users use an equivalent in
another language.

For image descriptions, we have little templates that mark the language, like
{{en|description in english}}
{{de|...}}
{{fr|...}}
{{zh|...}}

We have just started a bit of a drive to use these more (esp. English
ones are often not used) and from that we can derive things like "find
all images that are missing a description in language X". So in a few
more years I can imagine that will be quite impressive. At the moment
Picture of the Day often has around 15 or 20 different language
descriptions. It will be good if that is extended to, say, Quality
Images.

Although we try to be "multilingual" I am sad to say I don't think
everyone can participate on an equal footing regardless of which
language they speak. I think most policy and administration discussion
occurs in English.

For participating in processes like deletion, I think you could go
pretty well without using English -- if someone had come before you
and done the necessary translation. The actual process if pretty
automated, and I think we have done pretty well at inculclating the
value that "anyone can participate here with any language". So a
request in Russian might not get processed too quickly but the user at
least won't be commanded to write in English.

In requests for adminship I think we look very happily on multilingual
candidates and if you happen to speak a language that we don't yet
have an admin for, it's really not too hard to have success. :)

Then I suppose there is the general "cultural" thing where interacting
with someone who speaks English as a second language... and I
sometimes wonder "this is really dramatic, I wonder if that is
intentional?" So that's another element where you have to make "assume
good faith" your mantra.

Anyway, it would be more interesting to hear about this from the
perspective of a non-native-English-speaker's perspective. :)

> With regards to the developers request, hopefully, if the fundraising
> goes well, your wish should be answered.
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings
> Several new positions are planned with regards to developers.

Yes, I sincerely hope so :)

cheers,
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/