[Foundation-l] Advertisement

Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh at gmail.com
Sat Dec 30 15:31:57 UTC 2006


If one would post a message to all vilage pumps in english, I can see
the maillist flooded by messages concerning "anglosaxism", "language
pushing", "discrimination", etc. I don't think that would be a
solution.

Bryan

On 12/30/06, Teun Spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
> How? - by a bot.
>
> On the english wiki, I am a member of the Military history
> WikiProject. There is a newsletter, which appears every monbth or two
> months. All members are notified on their talk page. By a bot. Surely,
> if a project can manage this, the core of wikimedia can mange this? I
> admit, some volunteers are needed to do this.
>
> Yes, the language is a problem. At the moment I see no alternative to
> English. Translation by babelfish gives terrible results. At least at
> start, there wont be volunteers able to translate it. You are right
> that the next complaint will be that the message is in english. When
> we have taken this step, and the complaint comes, we can invite them
> to translate it.
>
> One of the problems with the current communication is that we rely a
> lot on "pull", not on "push". The information is posted somewhere, and
> it is left to the wikipedians to visiti these places frequently and
> read it. It is up to the wikipedians to discover these places. It is
> up to the wikipedians to go to these places frequently. It is up to
> the wikipedians to read them It is up to the wikipedians to act on it.
> This holds true for communication from the foundation. This is true
> for information from the local chapters. This is true for information
> from commons, such as deletions. It is true for policy changes on
> commons.
>
> There is no information brought to the door. I think it might be time
> to change all this. We might start about thinking delivering selected
> information to the people on their talk pages. information in the
> village pumps.
>
> I dont say we should communicate everything to everyone, but we may
> start thinking about such a change in our communication strategy.
>
> We are already communicating to the outside world based on "push".
> When the english wiki reaches it n-th million article, whap, out goes
> a press release. The same for commons: when the 1 million images
> milestone was reached. We dont wait till the media visit our sites to
> discover it, we go out and tell them.
> It wouldnt be bad when we followed the same line internally.
>
> teun
>
> On 12/30/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 12/30/06, Teun Spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Perhaps a bot posting sensitive messages into every village pump, simply in
> > > english, would be a solution.
> >
> > How? It would work somewhere. It wouldn't work in other places. If we
> > care the entire community, it is not the way we are going to,
> > regretfully I admit that is roughly what we are doing though.
> > Principally I have find no difference between communications via
> > sitenotice and ones via VP.
> >
> > On non-English projects, speically non Indo-European language
> > projects, I have seen some (important to some extent) messages posted
> > in English and left without comment. In this way the possiblity of
> > translation doesn't depend on its importance but genuinly availability
> > of volunteering translators. The next possible complaint would be "why
> > it came in English but not in our language?"
> >
> > --
> > KIZU Naoko
> >   Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
> >   * Nessuna poesia prima di noi *
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



More information about the wikimedia-l mailing list