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

[Aphaia]

Aah, I believe I succeeded in tracking the right direction now,

On 5/4/06, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> This said, I believe that a mid-way can be found.
>
> How about launching a massive translation rally (A translsation of the
> week maybe?) of Commons main page that would translate in smaller
> languages a "default" type of main page that does not need to be
> updated?

Good idea. Not completely, but it has been already applied to the
Foundation website. Some languages (eh, or only English now?) are
updated more frequently than other languages, and some languages
updated rarely, like Korean, were removed sections which needs
frequent updating.

For languages whose editors are hard to avail quickly, it is helpful
to set a page which contains minimum required information - even stats
would be a potential cause of aches for those languages. But after
all, a mite is infinitely valuable than void.

> While I believe I see the reasoning about getting rid of the "smaller"
> languages on the main page, while I understand the problem of having
> outdated main pages, I totally agree that smaller languages should not be penalized in accessing commons.

*nod*

As a P&T member, I daresay it would be a strategic loss to remove big
languages like Spanish / Japanese, whose projects are steadly growing
and many speakers of them are involved into the project, or just are
frequent visitors.

I admit it is a problem to have a start page poorly maintained, but a
shabby main page in their own languages are far better than splendid
main page written in a language they can hardly read. And again, I'd
like you to be aware there are some languages which fairly activated
projects with a huge number of pageview but poorly involved into the
so-called grobal activities of Wikimedia project - plainly activities
of English speaker both native and as foreign/second.

Besides those practical reasons, we could pay attention to emotional
aspects. Small languages' editors and visitors once removed would feel
dissapointment, sadness, disrespect or just anger. Addition is
normally no problem at that time: but removal has often caused a
raged, or at least negative reaction as far as I have experienced on
this problem.

Some of us can be recalled Hebrew Wikipedia past preferences to
restrict interlangs. They had their reasons, but its effect was, in my
opinion, disasterous rather than inpragmatic; some good editors were
raged and declaired their entire quitting from the project, even their
mother langue's. Later He people changed their mind and hostile
between them and other some editors dissapeared. I think this episode
has its moral stil now.

> I am not going to argue that Mediawiki is not fit for a multilingual
> website today, although that is probably the primary problem of
> commons.

So as meta, but it needs much more time and powerful hands of
developers to resolve.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com