[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When people from other projects tell me that this is one of the reasons why
they do not bother with Commons, I have to disbelieve them? Try to find
"paard" and you will not be served in the same way as with "horse" the
search result is inferior. Dutch is not the worst option, try "ίππος"  and
you find nothing. This is Greek and it also means horse.

It is indeed ridiculous that for people who do not read / write English,
Commons not a resource that is functional as a resource where you find
freely lincensed pictures. It is however a fact. Do some studies and ask
people to find images, people who do not read English. Try it in Arabic,
Russian, German, Mandarin, French or Dutch. When that does not convince you
try Neapolitan, Nepali, Bangla, Hindi or Xhosa. Have them search for things
that are of interest to a seven year old. Things like a horse...

I have had the financing to create a demonstration project that demonstrates
that this is a problem that can be solved. Our resources were limited so the
result is not as polished as I would hope for, but it does include the
category tree translated.

So the bad news is that Commons is unusable for everyone who does not read
English and the good news is, that it is a solvable problem.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2008/12/9 Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org>

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> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > Commons provides no benefit except for sharing the same picture to people
> > who do not read / write English. They cannot possibly find pictures and
> > consequently for them Commons is useless.
>
> That's simply ridiculous.
>
> Many files, categories, and galleries are labeled in multiple
> languages... or even not in English at all. :)
>
> Certainly it'll be *more useful* as we're able to add more widespread
> tag/category translations to help automate cross-language search, but
> the notion that people "cannot possibly find pictures" or that the site
> is "useless" is ridiculous and undermines the legitimate portion of your
> position (that it would be good to add more multilingual features to
> Commons).
>
> - -- brion
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