[Foundation-l] An agenda for the meeting of the language committee

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:45, M. Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are currently 13 members of the committee, all of them live in
> Europe, the US or Canada with the sole exception of Amir Aharoni, who
> currently lives in Jerusalem but lived in Russia until 1991 and whose
> native language is Russian. I find it hard to believe that the
> language committee has been actively recruiting Wikimedians or others
> in Asia, Latin America or Africa but faced constant rejection and lack
> of interest from all people in those places, which is the impression I
> got from what you said. I think the appropriate reaction to such a
> strong imbalance (and it is a very strong one) is not to say "Well, we
> will be happy to have them if they ever want to join" but to say "We
> recognize that this is an issue and we will actively recruit people to
> try to rectify it."

There is a lot of mystification around LangCom. Most importantly, it
is not a secretive active group with The Plan. It is a passive
decision-making body which implements Language proposal policy [1].
Basically, any proposal for a project in a natural living language
will pass if: (1) it has ISO 639-3 code, (2) it has a writing system
and (3) contributors have shown sustainable activity. All three
requirements are clearly measurable. And, as I said before, our job is
mostly boring. If implemented strictly, a computer could make
decisions. I need a couple of hours to make fully functional program.

Reasons why humans are better include just a couple of reasons:
* To be able to say to them: If you don't have an ISO 639-3 code, try
to get it and inform us after that.
* To realize that some requests are not so well worded or categorized
and to help to requesters to articulate it better.
* To realize if the request is trolling.

With one hour of training, I am sure that any Wikimedian would be able
to make valid decisions. I can do that job alone, as well as any
member of LangCom can do it alone. The job is very comparable with
front-officer's job: take application, see if it is valid, categorize
it, send it to the next instance (in our case Bugzilla).

In such circumstances, having culturally diverse committee is colorful
and nice, but far from any priority. So, yes, according to the present
situation, something like "Well, we will be happy to have them if they
ever want to join" (actually, "We will be happy to have *relevant*
persons from those areas to join us.") is fully legitimate position.

But, my idea was never that LangCom should stay there. Yes, I want to
see LangCom as an active working body.

And I am, actually, actively searching for new members. I found
Michael, Antony and Amir. But, it is not an easy task. You have to
know a couple of things about candidate is (1) reasonable and (2)
competent person who is (3) introduced in Wikimedia and (4) willing to
participate. About (3) and (4): we've got 5 (five) applications for a
couple of months (not sure, maybe almost half of year passed). And (1)
and (2) need to be checked somehow. It could be checked by Wikipedia
contributions, lists posts and personally (in real life or via net).

And there are a lot of similar descriptions of the situation which I
could give. Everything is on the line: if we are talking about the
present situation, then <something>; if we are talking about the ideas
for the future, then <something opposite>.

It is obviously that we'll need to discuss about active recruitment in
May, if we move toward more activity. In other words: complain noted.
So, you can go further with other suggestions :)

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy