[Foundation-l] Supporting languages is supporting people

[Nikola Smolenski]

On Wednesday 31 October 2007 11:40, Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/10/27, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> > It is wrong to suggest that the User Interface is not a vital component
> > of a successful Wikipedia. With some regularity projects are voted to be
> > closed down. They are typically programs that do not have a good
> > localisation, they are typically programs that do not have a community.
> > They are typically Wikipedias that have been started prematurely.
>
> So? I think you're having it backward now. Yes, projects that are
> voted to be closed down typically do not have a good localisation. Why
> is that? Not because the lack of a localisation causes the lack of a
> community, but the lack of a community causes the lack of a
> localisation. Localisations are there on projects where someone has
> worked on localisation. That implies that there is someone working on
> something, and projects where someone is working on something are
> usually not closed down. Projects that have over 50 articles on
> different plant species are also usually not voted down. Projects that
> have a bureaucrat are usually not voted down. Projects that have an
> active village pump are usually not voted down. Why require a
> localisation, but not 50 plant species, a bureaucrat or an active
> village pump?

As a mathematician, I believe you will appreciate the metaphor of quantum 
tunelling. The same way a particle can "tunnel" through an energy barrier it 
would otherwise not be able to go through, a project could pass a "knowledge 
barrier", if helped.

Localisation is an excellent example of this. We can all agree that people are 
less likely to contribute to a Wikipedia if there is no localisation. 
Localisation, however, requires a technically competent person to do it. If a 
given community has no such person, or all such persons are too preocupied 
with other matters to do it in their free time, the localisation will not be 
done. It might not be done for years, decades, or - ever.

And these years and decades are years and decades during which the project 
won't be developed, or will be developed at a much slower rate. If the goal 
of the WMF is producing free knowledge, and the WMF pays for hosting of 
Wikipedias in order to produce that knowledge, then it may also pay for a 
localisation (which would otherwise not happen) in order to achieve the same 
goal. This may enable free knowledge to be produced at a faster rate (for 
example, a Wikipedia may get 10 new articles per year before localisation, 
and 50 articles per year after localisation), thus fulfilling the goal of the 
WMF.

Of course, I am not suggesting that the WMF should immediately start paying 
for localisations of desolated Wikipedias. But, when it wants to lift a 
Wikipedia off the ground, it may well consider localisation of interface, 
documentation or even initial contents, and in some cases such a 
consideration will have desirable results.