[Foundation-l] Advertisement

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Everyone who is with the Wikimedia Foundation a little bit longer 
*knows* about the foundation mailing list, about Meta. Certainly for 
people like yourself and Jeroenvrp there is no such thing as "being 
confronted" with whatever. It is your choice to be informed. The 
Foundation and its board represent the communities as best as they can. 
The board consists of volunteers it is not feasible to have you, when 
you are not interested enough to read the mailing lists, force fed what 
you do not want to read. It is also not fair to complain about how the 
need for continually bigger needs for money are met without providing 
alternatives, credible alternatives.

The forced posting in English on "Village Pumps" is stupid; people are 
not going to read it. If they are interested to read things, they can 
subscribe to the several mailing lists that are in existence. Even then 
you will find that it is not enough because some communities expect that 
their POV, published on their mailing list, their "Village Pump" is to 
be accepted.

Truly, if there is to be subscribe/unsubscribe let it be by the persons 
who have a real interest. The people who are not interested will not 
read anyway and will still claim the right to complain.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Teun Spaans schreef:
> You might be right.
> I realize that posting in english is not optimal. But the present
> situation, where people are confronted with a change and must go
> hunting around to find where information has been published, has
> disadvantages too.
>
> One way to work around the problem os that this "push" becomes
> optional, in the senese that village pumps can subscribe/unsubscribe.
>
> teun
>
>
> On 12/30/06, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> 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 *