[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] second-class wikis

[Tim Starling]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> I will be indeed the last to say that the Betawiki developers are not part
> of the community of MediaWiki developers. The point that I tried to make
> here is that when the Lingala community produces its *own *developer, they
> will have a better grasp of the issues with the Lingala language. There are
> no  Betawiki developers who know about the needs of African languages. I
> know I can find such developers through people like Don Osborne and Martin
> Benjamin. They are programmers that are for hire. If we want a more complete
> solution, language needs to be given a priority and the many issues need to
> be identified first and addressed later. It is not only about Lingala.

There's no doubt it's useful to have programmers who speak the language.
They often come with the motivation to work on language-related problems,
an understanding of the wiki community, and familiarity with the
linguistics and data sources. Our Chinese variant feature, for instance,
has benefited greatly from work by Chinese-speaking developers.

But results can certainly be achieved if you have a bilingual community
member with no knowledge of programming, and a programmer willing to work
with them. We've even done language-related features with no help from
speakers whatsoever, just using online linguistics resources.

So I don't think the lack of a Lingala-speaking developer should be
considered a roadblock for the development of Lingala-related features.

-- Tim Starling