Hello Yaroslav
Thanks for your reply.
My point is that there is no clear strategy or process for prioritizing
which pages get translated. So, perhaps it is easy for some people to be
mixed up.
But I'm pretty confident that I understand the issues, and I'm not getting
anything mixed up. :-)
Looking at the upcoming election's pages on Meta, I see that many of the
basic pages that describe the election are not translated into more than a
few languages and those are not up to date.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats_election_FAQ…
Additionally, I feel strongly that most everyone in the wikimedia movement
should have the opportunity to read the candidate statements and Q&A of the
future WMF Trustees. But right now we don't have anyway of making sure that
even the languages of voting Chapters or thematic organizations have a good
method to get it done in a timely way.
It is troubling to me that an Affiliated organization's Board needs to be
proficient in English to do the translation. Not to mention that the Board
members don't select the timing of this election and may have serious
limitations on their time that prevents doing the translation.
This dynamic in the wikimedia movement needs to change. It is exclusionary
and unwelcoming.
We can not reach the people that the wikimedia movement needs to reach if
the burden of translation of these important official WMF processes a
completely volunteer process.
Going forward, I would like to see the percentage of pages translated as a
metric that is tracked, reported, and discussed regularly.
Warm regards,
Sydney
Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence
at Cochrane Collaboration
On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 10:29 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru>
wrote:
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
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