[Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:35 AM, Jay Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Multilingualism is at the core of our design thinking, as is the concept that everyone be able to take simple graphic forms and turn them into their own works.

That's a nice way of putting it.  Has anyone thought of making icons
for the core menu items and interface strings?  I know that some of
the main page redesign discussions have looked into simple icons for
each of the top-level categories or sections.  That would both help
with people who aren't very literate yet and with people who are
trying to navigate MediaWiki (whether on our projets or elsewhere) in
a language not their own.


> There's no simple answer for how to accommodate many languages. Do we start with 3? Which ones? All? I
> don't know - but at a minimum I'm glad to say that we factor into our production and writing the ideas of simple,
> easy to comprehend text that can be understood by those for whom English isn't a first language, and text that
> lends itself to easier translation. It doesn't overcome the challenge, but it's an important step.

+1 to this, and Jay's whole post.

SJ