[Foundation-l] Communicating effectively: Wikimedia needs clear language now

[Ilario Valdelli]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 4:19 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:16 AM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:
>
>> Mostly though, thanks to the Internet and multinational corporations,
>> godawful business jargon crosses all national borders. Words and
>> phrases like 'onboarding', 'stakeholders', 'mission statements',
>> 'platforms', 'proactive', 'sectors' and pretty much anything
>> 'strategic', for instance.
>
> Terms like "strategy", "mission statement" and "stakeholder" have
> concrete organizational meaning. Yes, they are also often used as part
> of marketing copy or organizational copy in ways that are unhelpful,
> because people who aren't good writers feel the need to plug holes by
> picking from the shared vocabulary of organization-speak. That doesn't
> make them meaningless, anymore than the fact that every idiot has an
> opinion on quantum physics makes quantum physics meaningless.
>

I work in an airline company and for a person coming from outside it
could be a real nightmare to speak about airline questions because the
environment is really full of "technical questions" and
"abbreviations".

For me it has been hard at the start because it was frequent to use
"ERP" for "Emergency Response Plan" but for me it was "Enterprise
Resource Planning".

A good compromise could be to create a "company dictionary" in order
to help all persons to use the same words to define the same concepts
and to help new persons to be part of the discussions.

This solution solves a lot of conflicts and helps the communication.

In Wikimedia environment the real problem is that anyone tries to
translate some technical words connected with some legal systems and
sometimes these words are peculiarities of these systems and could not
have a corresponding in others.

For instance in Paris I have looked in the word "entitlement" which
seems to be connected with the US system's of NGOs but has no
correspondent in the European legal systems (and sometimes it could
"illegal" in some countries).

Ilario