[Wikipedia-l] Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has subdomains)

Wed Jul 21 18:27:08 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>>This may be a good time to rethink our approach to Meta. Currently there  
>>is just one big, messy Meta-Wiki, with neither particularly clear policies  
>>(although my CPOV draft attempts to remedy this to some extent) nor  
>>interlanguage links. Help texts are spread across the "MediaWiki User's  
>>Guide" and the Help: namespace, with non-English texts in the English  
>>language Help: space. 

That was true a few weeks ago, but things have changed:
* Patrick is moving the complete User's guide into the help namespace
* there is a clear category system on 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/Meta:Categories which permits to find the 
important pages
* more cleanup ongoing

>> On the other hand, as Mav keeps pointing out, we  
>>have no real community editable Wikimedia presence.
>>
>>How about a setup like this:
>>de.wikimedia.org
>>en.wikimedia.org
>>fr.wikimedia.org
> 
> 
> Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place is
> currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the only
> common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and Meta
> should be made into a truly multilingual wiki. 

I agree with mav. In the german chapter we thought about setting up an 
own wiki for the chapter but in the end we decided to use meta to avoid 
balkanization and to facilitate cooperation.

I'd like to have a setting to switch the interface to german to make 
german meta-contributors feel more at home, but there's no need for 
separate wikis and zillion of translation pages.
My thoughts:
* our representation for visitors (the WMF website) should be multilingual
* the most important pages on meta should be translated (we don't have 
the capacities to translate everything)
* we should accept that we need a working language (english) for wikimedia
* pages in other languages should contain english abstracts
* pages in english can have abstracts in other languages

In my opinion, it's an illusion that participation in wikimedia affairs 
is possible without a basic knowledge of English. People should have the 
possibility to inform themselves about the goings-on, but it makes no 
sense f.e. to translate the german preparations for the Linuxtag Lörrach 
into spanish. On the other hand, the spanish people should be able to 
see that there are preparations done and ask the germans for experiences 
and tipps for a congress in Spain. If everything was done in separate 
wikis, they would probably not realize it.

greetings,
elian