[Foundation-l] The status of smaller languages on the Wikimedia Commons

[Daniel Arnold]

Hi,

Just in order to get the background on the issue. I am rewriting since 
Februrary all english help pages in Commons and the large majority does like 
my changes and in case not I was able to solve the issues in no time with all 
people but Teofilo in a collaborative manner (if you do not count 
licensing/deletion flames every admin faces).

@Teofilo: Do you think that Wikimedia foundation list is the right place for 
such an issue?
* This small step was not a sudded one (or shall I give you the all the links 
discussing that matter since February?).
* There is a debate on the issue at  
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Main_page_tweaks so 
there is really no need to debate such an issue here.

@Erik: Yes the criterias for doing so are at 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Help_page_maintenance (yes was 
created by me ;). For sure they were and will be adapted further with 
experience. Of course this page is also prominently linked in several places 
in Commons and of course also on Commons IRC topic and I made a lot of 
advertising of that page (by the way I badly need many people translating the 
first steps tutorial, and yes French is sadly one of the worst supported 
languages in Commons).

Currently the hiding affects only static content of pages that have more than 
20 translations and only in case certain translations are outdated 
("outdated" gets defined as well there and as well also a detailed rationale 
why doing so at all).

@Paweł: I don't think that the current solution is the best one but it was the 
easiest one. Have a look at the link to Village pump above where I gave more 
details. The nicest solution would be a expandable list displaying by default 
only the up to date translations but I hesitated doing so as this would 
require JavaScript which I think is not such a nice requirement at our main 
page if you want to access the outdated pages too.

@Delphine: The problem was that at first Commons help pages were just crap 
even  in english. So since February I'm mainly doing nothing else but totally 
rewriting all english Commons help pages and have come quite far. So now a 
greater translation call can take place. However I have often advertised it 
in the past to others doing more translations of pages that are done 
(especially to French people) but success of these translations calls was 
quite limited.

@GerardM: Commons bashing does help nobody and is in case of nl.wikipedia also 
at least in some cases far from truth have a look at: 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Commons-actions_damage_Wikipedia
(especially my last call and the end of the thread, as otherwise I predict you 
that "suddenly" there will be the next nl.wikipedians flame against Commons 
because of a severe copyright issue, only nl.wikipedians can solve).

So sorry for the larger post here and I really hope that people just keep the 
following in mind:
* Wikimedia Commons is a project faceing many technical difficulties (much 
more than Wikipedians can imagine). We have written several essential tools 
and interface tweaks on our own but Rome wasn't build in one day...
* Multilinguality in Commons is no easy matter. You always need to keep in 
mind that the projects needs to remain maintainable and that creating just 
some non-english strings is not enough.
* Many people do upload images in Commons throw them over the wall and forget 
about them as they don't want to contribute to the Commons project itself. 
Now try to imagine how busy the tiny fraction of active Commons 
administrators is...

Regards,
Daniel Arnold - Arnomane