[Foundation-l] Supporting languages is supporting people

[GerardM]

Hoi,
When you consider the localisation of messages, the messages can be divided
in two. There are messages that are project specific and there are messages
that have a global reach. When people localise messages, we do not ensure
that the effort on the global messages has a global effect. The best place
at this moment to localise messages is in the BetaWiki. A project that
should be a Wikimedia Foundation project. Its functionality should exist in
the Incubator and any localisation work done on MediaWiki that is global
should be happening in this one central place.

To make sure that localisation is efficient, the technology needs to be
improved. It needs to have a priority. We cannot maintain the localisation
for more than 250 languages and assume that it will be ok. It is not OK. A
fifth of the languages that MediaWiki is said to support is not supported in
MediaWiki. The percentages of localisation for many languages is dismal.
This hurts the usability of MediaWiki. The reason for all this is that the
localisation and the maintenance of the localisation does not get the
attention that it requires.

In my opinion the maintenance of MediaWiki and its localisations is a
responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation. There needs to be a plan to have
the required resources available on a sustained basis. Consequently the WMF
needs to acknowledge its responsibility because only then can we find, fund
and implement the solutions that work.

Thanks,
     GerardM

On 10/28/07, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/28/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Resources and investments also imply labour.
> ...
> > As long as the User Interface is
> > not localised it is not yet ready to go life for the people to find
> > information in their language.
>
> I don't understand what your argument is. You seem to be talking about
> priorities in MediaWiki development, but then you talk about interface
> localisation - which is a matter for the project participants who
> speak the language and can actually translate the interface, not for
> Foundation people.
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.bain at gmail.com
>
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