I completely agree with Amir.
Wikipedia is an unachievable goal itself. And this is precisely what it takes us to do It.
we have shown the world that only starting things, they move forward. Let's improve
coverage, one edit at a time.
As a tip: keep in mind other people's interests while editing articles ( geographical,
cultural, linguistical or event political) trying to discover and understand the others
while editing is one of the greatest prices Wikipedia can give to us everyday. This could
also bring some -needed- empathy to the movement itself.
Best
Àlex Hinojo
Amical Wikimedia
El 28 juny 2016, a les 21:37, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> va
escriure:
I am quite amused; it doesn't happen to me much
that people take so much
care to protect my privacy. I do appreciate it, though.
In case nobody guessed it, I am (probably) "Mr. Western Wikipedian". The
language gap in Wikipedias has always concerned me since the very first day
I tried editing Wikipedia in 2004—as a volunteer, and later as a WMF staff
member. I exchanged a few words about this with Mr. Rancic at Wikimania
because I know he cares about it. (In case you're wondering, I don't know
who are the other people that Mr. Rancic is mentioning.)
The problem is fairly easy to
It is a problem that some of the most spoken languages of the world have
very little information online. In Wikipedia and on other websites. I'm
talking about Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Indonesian, Tagalog, and a few
others. India is just the biggest of the countries in question, but
certainly not the only one. There's even less information online in smaller
languages, which is just as bad, even though they are smaller. It's a deep
social problem that bothers me more and more as the years go by, and as I
learn about these languages, about the countries in which they are spoken
and about the people who speak them—especially those of them who don't
speak any other language.
The WMF could solve _some of it_. I am not entirely sure how. It's a
vicious circle of sociolinguistics making dominant languages even more
dominant, and less demanded languages even less demanded. It has a lot to
do with culture and politics, a bit of which I understand, and a lot of
which I don't.
As a developer of the Content Translation tool and other related things, I
very naïvely hope that I (not alone, of course!) am helping to resolving a
tiny bit of it. But I cannot resolve all of it, and WMF alone cannot
resolve all of it. Even though Wikimedia's famous "every single human
being" motto definitely puts this problem in Wikimedia's declared scope,
it's way too big and complex to be resolved with the resources the WMF
currently has. It's better to acknowledge that we cannot solve all of it
quickly, even though we'd love to, then to pretend that we'll save the
world the next week. (Bringing other people to Wikimania will also not save
it, certainly not by itself. That said, variety is a good thing.)
On an optimistic note, I have to reiterate that the recently started
research project that Anne Gomez mentioned is probably the best step that
the WMF ever made in this direction. I've been waiting for something like
this to happen since 2012 or so. It's an important acknowledgement that
there are a lot of things that we don't know, and that we want to try to
learn them. It's only a small first step, but a truly good one, and I'm
eager to see how it develops.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2016-06-28 21:43 GMT+03:00 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>:
My last mail for today, so Anne, just to say that
I really appreciate
what you've done, but I'll comment in a bit more detail tomorrow.
On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I'll leave the "defensive" bit
aside, and just reiterate that I *still*
do
not understand exactly what problem you're
trying to focus discussion on.
In the piece of text Asaf quoted, you used the words "it" and
"reports."
I
don't know what you intend by those words.
Maybe for some reason you feel
it's Asaf's job to clarify that for the rest of the list's readers; maybe
so. I don't have more to contribute on this point.
The background goes this way...
I've been approached privately two years ago about the issues that
bother significant part of Indian Wikimedian community. As I think
that's in the range of quite solvable issues, my instinct was to talk
with the relevant people inside of the Wikimedia movement (not just
WMF). I thought it's been solved and I forgot for that. However, two
years later I am listening about the same problems. So, I am pissed
off enough to start talking about that on this list.
However, if I say everything I know, I would for sure harm a number of
people. And I am not willing to do that no matter how pissed off or
drunk I am. The situation is not good, but far from being any kind of
catastrophe.
But I want to see the problem solved. So, I am giving quite enough of
information about the problems (cf. my first email, then my response
to Risker) and expect the beginning of communication. The responses
are telling me what's safe to talk about and what's not. I also expect
to be convinced that the most of Indian Wikimedians will be content at
the end of this process.
So, the research is very good thing and I am again positively
surprised by the attitude of WMF. However, that's not enough.
I also want to say that what I said in my first email and in my
response to Risker is the core of the problem. Many particular issues
are not useful (and could be harmful). I understand that many people
on this list don't realize how those issues are important, but they
*are* vitally important to the Indian part of our movement.
In other words, although I am not disclosing all of information I
have, mostly to protect privacy of some people, I am not cryptic at
all. It is just a matter of what's perceived as important to a Western
and what to an Indian Wikimedian.
--
Milos
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