[Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[Samuel Klein]

Hi Teofilo,

Thanks for raising all of these points.  I agree that we should have
our important essays and communication in multiple languages.  And I
was wishing myself that we had a multilingual blog planet that
combined all of the monolingual ones... sometimes we segment ourselves
by language in a way that just doesn't let us connect with one
another.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia#Other_languages

> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:BLPLang is not currently
> used at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary

In this particular case:  the language templates on that wiki are
added once multiple language versions of a doc are in place.
"BLPLang" or "StaffLang" templates are custom to the BLP or Staff
page.  So the lack of a template just means no other language
translations have been posted yet.


On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 7:21 PM, M. Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:

> on the Internet are fluent in English. English bilingualism is much
> more frequent in, say, the Indian internet community than it is in the
> Chinese internet community. I think we should take the following
> approach towards "crucial" languages:
>
> 1) Start with one language that all official documents must be in; due
> to current structure of WMF, this would be English.
> 2) To choose the subsequent language, search for the language with the
> greatest number of non-English speakers; for the sake of argument
> let's say it's Spanish (although it may be Chinese in reality).
> 3) For the third language, search for the language with the greatest
> number of people who do not speak English or language 2 (in this case,
> Spanish).
> 4) And so on and so forth.

This was part of the thinking behind the original 'core languages' list.

We also considered
* how many different cultures/countries/regions could be reached with
a language (not just raw # of primary- or secondary-language speakers)
-- there are many low-population parts of the world that speak Spanish
or French but not English or Chinese or Arabic, and
* how many active Wikipedians there are, both readers and
contributors, who prefer to read or write in that language.  (Even if
you and your friends can read English, if you are much more likely to
forward a link to a Hindi-language essay, that is relevant to our
community growth and balance.)  We have slightly better data for some
of this now, and perhaps different thoughts on how to balance the
different criteria.   .

> This cuts down on potential redundancy; of course if somebody wants to
> translate all documents into Irish or Basque, we will be happy to
> receive such translations. I do agree with the suggestion that we
> require documents be translated into a certain (small) group of
> languages.  We do rely on volunteer translators, but we are not saying
> "you must translate this" but rather "we will not release this to the
> public until it has been translated to this language".

Yes.  es/fr/zh may still be a fair place to start - in terms of
covering the world's regions and population by secondary-language.

SJ