[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has subdomains)

Mon Jul 19 05:35:00 UTC 2004

Anthere-
> Meta is the only place where we can really meet, and find information
> that someone else left.

Can you give me a single example where splitting Meta by subdomain would  
do any harm in bringing people together? I would like to move this  
discussion from the general, emotional "Don't split us up!" to the  
specific, rational "This is where it would cause problems" level. What  
recent policy discussion or vote would have been harmed by this approach?

Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an example. The whole  
discussion was mostly English as was the voting page. If we used  
subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that the page be  
translated into the main languages before we vote. We could have  
aggregated the votes from the different language Wikimedias so that each  
community could express their preferences in their language. We could have  
translated important arguments from the discussion in realtime (in the  
form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for example).

This is a lot better than having a single page with the occasional piece  
of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple of participants. In  
that case, the main part of the page is English - excluding those who  
don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion are not - excluding  
those who don't speak that language. It's a lose-lose situation.

> In my experience, it does bring people together, provided that you
> welcome the interaction.

I can't interact with someone whose language I do not speak, unless  
someone translates it for me. A Wikipedia-style setup facilitates that.

> Plus, there are japanese and chinese people currently over there. We
> have Tomos, Suisui, Britty etc...

Exactly - the people on Meta are mostly the ones who speak some amount of  
English. Someone who doesn't speak any English won't even understand the  
user interface.

> This is what is happening on the multinlingual mailing lists, because
> each time someone DARE putting a word in a language different than
> english, he is severely told that "of course, he could write in english,
> because really, no one can understand him".

First, I must remind you that my main objection in the last debate on this  
matter was using a different language in order to exclude others from a  
certain comment. This is a completely separate issue, and I would have the  
same objection on Meta.

Second, if you want to reach the *largest number* of people, you should  
either use English or make sure that what you say gets translated into  
English. That should be very obvious, no? It would be helpful if you could  
acknowledge this simple point.

Translations become far easier with a consistent approach, and people feel  
more welcome if the main site they navigate is in their mother tongue.  
This seems to work very well for Wikipedia, I don't see why it shouldn't  
work on Meta.

This is about giving non-English projects a larger voice instead of  
relying on multilingual people like you to act as mouthpieces for those  
who don't speak English. Just like there is a Wikipedia community for  
every language, there should be a Wikimedia community for each. Once you  
have something like ja.wikimedia.org, the creation of a Japanese Wikimedia  
chapter becomes more likely as well because people will find it far easier  
to interact when there is no constant interference by what is *effectively  
indistinguishable from random noise* to them. The problem of creating  
project-wide policies is addressed through board review and voting  
standards.

It may be a good idea to put this issue to a Wikimedia-wide vote if we  
fail to reach consensus.

Regards,

Erik