[Foundation-l] Announcing Eugene Eric Kim as the Strategy Plan Project Manager

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
With some 50% of our traffic in other languages then English it is obvious
that languages, internationalisation and localisation are of a profound
importance to the WMF. There are over 250 Wikipedias and we support over 300
linguistic entities at translatewiki.net where our internationalisation and
localisation is located. When a strategic plan for the WMF is to be made,
addressing the needs for these other languages is consequently as important
as the needs for the English projects.

When you look at the investments and the projects of the WMF, the other 50%
hardly feature. The Usability Initiative is about improving the English
Wikipedia, the new project for Commosn is to improve the ability of getting
images in while you need to know English to get images out of Commons. When
we get 100.000 images from the Tropenmuseum, how will we support Indonesian
and English when the annotations are Dutch? What if there are over 200 GLAM
in the Netherlands alone ??

The LocalisationUpdate extension is imho the most relevant piece of software
to improve the localisation of our projects and to motivate our localisers,
it was developed outside of the WMF. The MediaWiki software does not support
African languages well. We know what the problem is but we fail African
languages.

When I ask for measurments, I ask for numbers that show how the WMF
implements its strategy for other languages. How long does it take for
localisations to go life. What is the relation between the popularity of our
projects for a language and the localisation. What are is the amount of WMF
money spend on exclusively English language projects compared to the amount
of money exclusively earmarked for the other languages. How many words are
used in the annual reports on issues that are English vs the issues for the
other languages.

I have been pushing the cause of the "other languages" for quite some time.
I would like to see that the "other languages" have as much traction as
English in the WMF because I believe the "other projects" have a potential
that is bigger then the English Wikipedia.
Thanks,
       GerardM


2009/7/14 Eugene Eric Kim <eekim at blueoxen.com>

> Hi Gerard,
>
> Thanks for the welcome! There are really two questions here: The
> importance of language, internationalization, and localization in the
> context of the plan itself, and the importance of all of these things
> in the context of the strategic process. They'll be important for
> both.
>
> What specifically are you interested in measuring?
>
> =Eugene
>
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Gerard
> Meijssen<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > There is one question that is obvious for me to ask.. What will the role
> be
> > of language, internationalisation and localisation in the strategy of the
> > WMF and how will it be possible to measure this ?
> > Thanks,
> >     GerardM
> >
> > PS Welcome
>
> --
> ======================================================================
> Eugene Eric Kim ................................ http://xri.net/=eekim
> Blue Oxen Associates ........................ http://www.blueoxen.com/
> ======================================================================
>
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