[Foundation-l] Meta-arbcom (was: the foundations of...)

[Thomas Dalton]

> Retranslate: No - if we have a case from a project whose participants use
> French as a second lanugage, simply pick arbitrators who speak french.

If you select a subset of the committee based on languages spoken,
it's harder to ensure a "fair trial", since it's not a random
selection. It also removes the benefit of having various points of
view - the French speaking members are likely to be the members active
on the French projects, so you lose the wealth of knowledge that
members of other projects could bring.

> Risk of misunderstanding - this will happen even if you use english only.
> You cannot guarentee what you see is what is meant.  However, in my proposal,
> you at least have the source language in you hand and you can verify.
> As I have said,
> there is  a substantial pool of wikimedians to supply important comments

You can never eliminate the risk, but you can reduce it. The risk from
people's English not being perfect is far less than the risk of
misunderstanding an auto-translation.

> There is no translation?   Do you forget that the English or French that you
> see are translations themselves?

Once you speak a language to a reasonable degree, you don't work out
what you want to say in your native tongue and then translate it, you
write it directly in the other language. There is no translation.