[Foundation-l] An agenda for the meeting of the language committee

M. Williamson node.ue at gmail.com
Thu Feb 24 09:45:36 UTC 2011


There are currently 13 members of the committee, all of them live in
Europe, the US or Canada with the sole exception of Amir Aharoni, who
currently lives in Jerusalem but lived in Russia until 1991 and whose
native language is Russian. I find it hard to believe that the
language committee has been actively recruiting Wikimedians or others
in Asia, Latin America or Africa but faced constant rejection and lack
of interest from all people in those places, which is the impression I
got from what you said. I think the appropriate reaction to such a
strong imbalance (and it is a very strong one) is not to say "Well, we
will be happy to have them if they ever want to join" but to say "We
recognize that this is an issue and we will actively recruit people to
try to rectify it."

2011/2/24, Lodewijk <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org>:
> As far as I am aware, but please correct me if I'm wrong, the language
> committee has always tried to gather a large diversity from all over the
> world. However, it seems hard to find people from underrepresented regions
> to bother themselves with this boring matter (no offense). So if you know a
> good candidate from a region you feel is underrepresented, just put them in
> touch with Gerard and I'm confident they will be able to at least
> incorporate the knowledge.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Lodewijk
>
> 2011/2/24 M. Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>
>
>> To me, this is still a problem. If the committee never made any
>> decisions and instead relied 100% on the opinions of others, then
>> perhaps the composition wouldn't matter. However, think about this: if
>> you gather a committee to make decisions about agriculture and recruit
>> only from European countries, you will find a very different group of
>> opinions than if you recruit from Africa or India. The same is
>> certainly the case here. The way people think about languages and
>> linguistic diversity differs around the world, and it is not to our
>> benefit to have a committee composed of mostly people from one part of
>> the world, especially considering that over 60% of Earth's population
>> lives in Asia. What I am not suggesting is that we should invite the
>> world's foremost expert on Hindi or Sino-Tibetan languages to be a
>> member of the committee; what I am suggesting is that we should invite
>> people similar to existing members, except that they happen to be from
>> Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. So people with a deep interest in
>> many languages, who can bring us different perspectives.
>>
>> 2011/2/23, Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org>:
>> > On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 06:55, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta at gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >>> One thought occurred to me: there is no representation of Asian
>> languages
>> >>> in
>> >>> the committee (and I don't mean only Indian languages). Would the
>> >>> committee
>> >>> want to consider an expansion in membership to include someone who is
>> >>> fluent
>> >>> in one or more Asian languages?
>> >>
>> >> In principle yes, but... [1]
>> >>
>> >> Linguistic qualifications for becoming a LangCom member are not so
>> >> simple. After a couple of years in LangCom, I may say that many
>> >> professors of linguistics don't fit. And the main reason is not their
>> >> knowledge, but attitude toward languages. Or, to be more precise,
>> >> their boldness. For example, LangCom tasks require from one
>> >> Indo-Europeanist to give expertize on any Indo-European language, but
>> >> many of them would say that the classification of, let's say, Kurdish
>> >> languages is not the part of their job, but the part of the job of an
>> >> expert in Iranian languages. Such expert in LangCom is basically
>> >> useless.
>> >
>> > Doesn't the language committee also actively seek out experts in
>> > different languages when they need to?  I seem to recall you guys
>> > having all test wikis checked by a linguist/expert who speaks the
>> > language before they are created.
>> >
>> > So it's not like people who speak Asian (or other similar) languages
>> > aren't being actively involved, it's just that none of them are in the
>> > "administrative committee" at this time.  At least that's how I
>> > remember it being explained many threads ago. :-)
>> >
>> > --
>> > Casey Brown
>> > Cbrown1023
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
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>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> skype: node.ue
>>
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