[Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[M. Williamson]

Gerard, that seems like quite a bit of money, I'd be curious to know
what exactly that would be spent on, in detail.

2011/3/5 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> Hoi,
> The Wikimedia Foundation is a five hundred pound gorilla in the field of
> building language resources in the languages that have a smaller footprint
> on the Internet. I am convinced that for a million Euros we can make sure
> that all languages have technically a level playing field.
>
> I have proposed to spend 100,000,- Euro and this will make major
> improvements for the scripts, the fonts and the standards for the languages
> we have a Wikipedia for. This is given the current budget chicken feed.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
> On 5 March 2011 22:58, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 5 March 2011 21:48, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > The notion that everyone working on Wikipedia and MediaWiki is a
>> volunteer
>> > is a fallacy.
>> > The one thing I have been advocating is that the different languages and
>> > scripts are performing technically on a level playing field. This is not
>> the
>> > case and there is a lot that can be achieved with modest investments. At
>> > this stage we do not want to invest in specific languages to create
>> content.
>> > If a language is viable and can operate on a level playing field the
>> > communities will do their thing in the way that fits for them.
>>
>>
>> Yes. The advocates of a minimal Foundation are missing the point that
>> "in their own language" is an extremely good reason to spend money on
>> the necessary translations and so forth.
>>
>> The Chapter structure is a brilliant way to get this sort of thing
>> locally self-organising and not be run from San Francisco. But as Amir
>> points out, this results in very patchy coverage.
>>
>> Really. Take the sentence:
>>
>> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
>> the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
>>
>> - and think of how to fund everything that implies, or to fund its
>> encouragement, or to fund encouraging the funding of its
>> encouragement. The WMF as it stands is *tiny* for such a goal.
>>
>>
>> - d.
>>
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