[Foundation-l] English language dominationism is striking again

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When you think that Commons is bad in supporting other languages, try to
find pictures of a horse on the internet in other languages like Estonian,
Nepalese ... It is not the same at all as when you are looking for images in
English. Commons has the advantage that many Wikipedias refer to a category
where pictures of for instance a horse can be found.

There has been a demonstration project that demonstrated that it is possible
to associate a concept in a translation dictionary with the names of
categories in Commons. It was demonstrated that not only is it possible, it
is also possible to change the text of the category and show a word in the
language selected by the user.

At OmegaWiki.org we have the ability to bring translations and Commons
categories together.. We do that for quite some time now.

Given that such support is thought to be difficult and expensive. What can
be done to improve the support for both information and articles, is to have
"referral" pages on Wikipedias. They are pages that do not have much more
then a definition of the concept and refer to Wikipedias that do have an
article on a subject. When a link is available to a Commons category, it is
possible to refer to Commons as well.

This does not require much investment and it will make the Wikipedias with
few articles more useful. It will grow our traffic and when we learn what
"referral" articles are in demand, we know what articles will make a
difference when they have a genuine article.
Thanks,
        GerardM

On 22 June 2010 13:10, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> News from the front.
>
> A very bad and unfair unbalance of power was established in favor of
> English on Wikimedia Commons in 2005-2006, requiring people from the
> world to work for the benefit of the English language community.
>
> In that ocean of unfairness, there was a small island where you could
> find comfort and grace : biological taxa: the names of animals and
> plants. For centuries the scientific community had been used to using
> latin, creating a space where scientists from the world are nearer to
> being equals, everybody needing to leave her/his native tongue and use
> a foreign language. Wikimedia Commons had decided to name categories
> accordingly.
>
> I have discovered a few days ago that someone, probably in good faith
> and unaware of this language policy, created [[:Category:Animals by
> common named groups]] which is a container for English-named
> biological taxa, at the end of 2008.
>
> Now I find people pushing for this container and English named wild
> animal species. So the front line is broken.
>
> More reading at :
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Category:Wolves
>
>
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Biologie/Le_caf%C3%A9_des_biologistes#Cat.C3.A9gories_en_latin_en_danger_sur_Commons
>
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