[Foundation-l] leaflets

[Ziko van Dijk]

Interesting to read about your experiences. Yes, a rough text in English
would be useful.
My main problem with many leaflets and brochure remains the question: to
whom do we speak. Once I saw a leaflet that was - in my opinion - extremely
limited to one single target group: people from the open source movement.
Alright, if that is the target group. But I got the impression that the
makers of the leaflet tried to address the general public, and that would
not work. So, I would like to know, how you (Lars and others) difine your
target group.
And what is the target group supposed to do having read the leaflet:
- know something they should know (e.g., Wikipedia has sister projects)
- have a certain emotion (Wikipedia is a serious and trustworthy thing)
- go to the Wikipedia homepage (and have a look of themselves)
- become an author,
or
- donate.
Sometimes one must concentrate on some targets at one time...
Nowadays the problem is no longer that people have not heard about the
Wikipedia, but many are still sceptical about it, about quality.
Besides, I am afraid that a manual (how to become a Wikipedian) needs to be
a quite thick one, written as such (maybe as a wikibook). We tend to
underestimate how difficult it is to become an author of Wikipedia,
certainly if you did not grow up with computers. :-)

Ziko






2008/3/3, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:
>
> Guillaume Paumier wrote:
>
> > I think you're mixing two very different matters. What needs to
> > be translated or adapted is the content, i.e. the *text*. And
> > each language should write their own text, because it's always
> > better than translation. On the other hand, there's the design
> > and the layout, which don't change across languages. Once the
> > text is written, it takes nothing to add it to an existing
> > layout.
>
>
> I absolutely agree that we should write our own texts.  But
> Swedish wikipedians don't spontaneously come up with a 16 page
> brochure about how to edit Wikipedia. Even if I show them the
> printed "Das kleine Wikipedia-Einmaleins", they just shake their
> heads and don't understand more than two words of the title, even
> if they took German in school.  What they need is a rough
> translation that they can read, and use as inspiration, before
> they can get started in writing a useful version in their own
> language.  And far more people can read English than German.
>
> I have started to translate this particular text to Swedish, as a
> first step towards producing a useful Swedish version, but that
> won't help all the people who need to write one in Polish, Czech,
> Thai or Spanish.  If someone could please translate the text of
> such brochures to English, it would be very useful.
>
>
>
> --
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Roomberg 30
NL-7064 BN Silvolde