On 2016-03-11 15:58, Sydney Poore wrote:
I agree with antanana / Nataliia Tymkiv that broader translation of WMF BoT election pages is important.
To reach the goal where "every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge" the wikimedia movement needs to prioritize translation as a regular part of key processes.
We are failing at this today. The wikimedia movement lacks a clear strategy to shift the cost (funds and human resources) from non-English speaking volunteers to the broader wikimedia movement.
I welcome a hearty discussion about how the Affiliate-selected Board of Trustee election can be made more accessible to more non-English speaking people. And also a larger discussion as part of the WMF Strategic Plan discussion, and the upcoming WMf Annual Plan. Warm regards, Sydney User:FloNight
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
Hi Sydney,
as I mentioned earlier, I am afraid there are two things mixed up here. There a big step between making the candidate statements and answers to questions to all individuals who are eligible to vote at the forthcoming elections, and providing the sum of human knowledge in all languages.
In practical terms, every person who speaks Dutch and is a member of Wikimedia Nederland / Belgium also speaks English and would be able to understand the candidate statements. On the other hand, Dutch as a language is spoken by 20M people, and we need of course to consider support of Dutch Wikipedia / sister projects / Wikidata, Commons, and Mediawiki interface with a high priority. As another example, I believe we have zero Quechua speakers who are eligible to vote, and translating statements into Quechuan languages would be a loss of time. On the other hand, these languages have 9 million speakers, and definitely need their own projects.
I agree that both should be discussed, but let us separate the things. One issue is a global priority of languages in terms of the projects etc and whether they need to be supported, another issue is whether there are some languages the statements of the candidates should be urgently translated to in order to help the voters decide.
Cheers Yaroslav