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

[Michael Bimmler]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 7:23 AM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> They might not be able to find "ίππος". However, they might be able to
> use this big list of word pairs called a dictionary to translate
> "ίππος" into English "horse" and search for that.
>
> Not very comfortable, but hardly impossible as you claim.

I guess one of the points is (and I admit that I'm just jumping in
here, without having read the entire thread due to time constraints,
so please mercifully ignore this if I'm completely off the mark), that
the English speakers do not need to take this extra step of looking
for a dictionary (online or hard copy) first. Of course this is one of
the inherent problems of international collaboration but still, if you
put it this way, it does leave this spirit of "Why the drama about all
these non-English speakers, if they want to partake in the glories of
Wikimedia Commons, they'll have to get their act together and find a
dictionary (or else learn English)" and while I'm sure you do not mean
it in this way, I do understand people who object to this...after all,
the internationalization of a project is hardly promoted if you just
focus on one language and distribute dictionaries to the rest.

So much for the nice, idealistic theory. I'm not even going to start
venturing into the shallow waters of how to put this into
practice...and I do realize that this limitation makes this post
less-than-useful :-)

Michael


-- 
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler at gmail.com