[Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Website

Wed Aug 4 22:19:14 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Thus a language-selection portal would be appropriate and expected for the
>foundation website. Not having it right away is simply due to the lack of a
>technically and aesthetically good implementation. A side benefit of creating
>such a portal would be adapting it for use at www.wikipedia.org and other www
>wikimedia project domains. 
>  
>
Unless we can get everyone translated accurately pretty quickly, we 
might want to still give English primacy as the language in which 
Foundation business is conducted.  This wouldn't be related to where the 
Foundation is incorporated, just due to the fact that if we were to list 
all languages that members understand at least somewhat, English would 
almost certainly come out ahead by far, and it's the language most 
commonly used for cross-borders business these days outside of Wikipedia 
as well.  (If at some point it turns out that everyone learns Esperanto, 
I'd be happy to move to that; or if people learn Latin again, we could 
move back to using Latin as the international language of 
correspondence, but for now it seems English has more speakers than any 
of the alternatives).

Of course, instant high-quality translations would be even better, but 
especially for sensitive things we have to be careful that the 
translations actually all capture the same nuances of meaning.

-Mark