[Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[Casey Brown]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> A UN-like model, with several major languages, into which important
> Foundation releases *must* be translated, is a realistic solution that
> will enable more people to read them. This, however, also poses the
> danger of perpetuating current linguistic conflicts. For example,
> translating the WMF blog into Chinese will allow a lot of people who
> know Chinese, but not English, read it, but it will yet again put
> Chinese above the regional languages of China; the same can be said
> about Russian, Spanish, French, Indonesian and other major languages.
> Nevertheless, done properly, it's better than staying English-only.

This is a very interesting idea.  (My last post was mostly directed at
the original poster's comments about us rejecting multilingualism, not
your proposal.  Sorry if I didn't make that clear!)

I don't know if we should necessarily say that they "*must* be
translated" into those languages, since we are volunteer-driven, but
this could be more of a coordinator-thing... like we need to make sure
that we keep volunteers on-hand and supported who speak these
languages.  If we see a gap in a certain language, we'll try to
replace that person ASAP.  We might want to try to revive translation
teams, and make sure that we always have a well-staffed translation
team with members ready to translate into these big languages.

Anyway, I would love to have people working to make an updated
priority list that they think we should use. :-)  The metrics that
Mark suggests are a great idea.  Number of speakers, number of
monolingual (or native) speakers, and size of the editing community
would be great things to consider.

-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023