[Foundation-l] A chapters-related question

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When it comes to special interests, there are two existing groups you can
add to the list.. There is a group who wants to enable MediaWiki for African
languages. There is a group who are working on an extension in order to
enable sign languages using the SignWriting script.

For the African languages we can have support for finding out what issues
exist to enable African languages. We need a developer for that, we need WMF
support for that.

For sign languages work is under way to write this software. It will need
support from developers to assess the code and possibly sanitise the code.
This will need WMF support. There are two requests for Wikipedias for sign
languages.. The language committee finds that the primary missing part to
the request is MediaWiki functionality.
Thanks.
     GerardM

2009/7/6 Mike.lifeguard <mikelifeguard at fastmail.fm>

> On Sun, 2009-07-05 at 21:54 -0700, Michael Snow wrote:
>
> > One example is interest groups
> > that aren't tied to geography, the way the chapters are. I always cite
> > the idea of an Association of Blind Wikipedians, who might wish to
> > organize to promote work on accessibility issues.
>

>
> Actually, that sounds like a good idea. I wonder if there's interest
> among people involved with accessibility (whether blind or not - for
> example I'd potentially be interested in helping).
>
> More concretely, there has been (for a while) talk of a Wikibooks
> "chapter"... it obviously wouldn't be based on geography, but could
> promote Wikibooks and Wikibooks-related issues, and develop programs and
> software for that project. Many of the sister projects may feel a
> similar need - other than Commons, I don't know of any major projects to
> promote growth or reach for the non-Wikipedia projects. Disappointingly,
> the usability initiative is explicitly about improving usability on
> Wikipedia, and not other projects. While there may be concomittant
> improvements, there's nothing specific for us, while everything is
> specific for Wikipedia. Luckily that will be addressed for Commons with
> this latest grant.
>
> However, beyond technical issues, there is a lot the Wikibooks community
> could do in terms of promotion and outreach that isn't being done by the
> community or the Foundation currently. There's only so much volunteers
> can do from the bottom up without some organization and support, and the
> Foundation can only do so much from the top down. An organized
> chapter-like body would fill a gap between the two that could
> potentially have an enormous impact on the project since it smaller.
>
> Thanks,
> -Mike
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>