[Wikimedia-l] conversations between WMF and non-English projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Thank you for the links, Tilman!


2012/8/4 Tilman Bayer <tbayer at wikimedia.org>:
> On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
> <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In the 2012-13 WMF plan document I saw an interesting thing:
>> "We’ve hosted key community stakeholders such as English Wikipedia’s
>> ArbCom and Portuguese Wikipedia’s top contributors, in an effort to
>> better understand and respond to issues they're facing." (page 41).
>>
>> I was very happy to read this. In general, I hope that such focused
>> meetings will be held with more language communities. I don't think
>> that I need to explain why :)
>>
>> I don't know how did the meeting with the Portuguese Wikipedians go;
>> I
>> suppose that it was good. I don't remember that I read anything about
>> it in blogs or mailing lists, but I may have missed it.
> Apart from the one post linked by Steven
> (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/22/brazil-meetups-march/ ), the
> Wikimedia blog has seen several other posts about other meetings of
> WMF with Portuguese Wikipedia contributors in Brasil:
>
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/20/brazil-campus-party/
>
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/11/brazil-recruiting-and-partnership-with-the-community-moves-forward/
>
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/19/brazil-trip-3/
>
> See also the recurring Brazil Catalyst section in the monthly WMF reports.
>
>> Maybe what I'm
>> about to write is known already, but I'll say it anyway.
>>
>> An important thing in such meetings is to have a community member who
>> contributes to the Wikipedia in that language AND to the English
>> Wikipedia. This is needed because the Foundation people are probably
>> familiar with policies, customs and jargon in the English Wikipedia.
>> Even simple terms, like "Village Pump", are not necessarily familiar
>> to people who primarily edit in other languages; not all Wikipedias
>> have ArbComs; not all Wikipedias prohibit voting; etc. Such a person
>> will be able to "translate" between the English Wikipedia terms and
>> the local Wikipedia terms. Without such a person misunderstandings
>> will definitely happen, even if everybody knows the English language
>> well.
> You are of course right that it is important to be aware of the
> differences between the many language versions of Wikipedia. But it
> might be worth knowing that the WMF's Brazil Catalyst project
> (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programa_Catalisador_do_Brasil ) has
> been run out of Brazil by a native speaker of Portuguese for quite
> some time now, with a WMF contractor who has been editing on the
> Portuguese Wikipedia and (less frequently) the English Wikipedia since
> 2006. I'm not sure about the validity of your conjectures with regard
> to them.
>
> And even before that, there had been in-depth efforts by WMF to
> understand the local community, see e.g.
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project/Community_Interviews
>
> --
> Tilman Bayer
> Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
> Wikimedia Foundation
> IRC (Freenode): HaeB
>
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