Monday, November 03, 2008

On the monthly Betawiki information

The Betawiki statistics for October are in again. With the request for Western Panjabi we now support 321 linguistic entities. Of these only 102 provide the most basic support, 61 languages cover 90% of the core messages and 24 provide a 90% coverage for the extensions used in Wikimedia Foundation projects. The good news is that compared with last month, the numbers are essentially up except for the WMF used extensions.

When you compare this with a year ago, you will find that we have come a long way. I was told at the Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland, that with the move to Betawiki by the German localisation effort more people had become involved and that the quality had gone up. At the same conference i learned that many people are just not aware of its existence and significance; I hope that we may expect some Frisians at Betawiki.

Because of the continuous development of MediaWiki it is really hard almost impossible to maintain the localisation for a language. We have an increasing number of developers resulting in daily updates to the MediaWiki messaging and for the majority of our languages, it is impossible to keep up.

After such a realisation, the question is how to support these languages better. It is arguably best for them NOT to run on the bleeding edge of MediaWiki software. Running on bleeding edge should be reserved to those languages who are able to maintain their localisation.

With this discrimination in the support of languages, we give added weight to our stable software. This will improve the usability of MediaWiki for our end users.

When we make such a division, the only argument should be the quality of the localisation effort. This would provide a powerful incentive for language communities to maintain their localisation in order to have the latest and greatest of what MediaWiki has to offer. It is crucial to keep in mind what this is to achieve; to provide our readers, our editors with the best support in our projects and localisation is essential.
Thanks,
GerardM

5 comments:

GerardM said...

I learned from Siebrand that it was mhr or Eastern Mari that was added in October.
Thanks,
GerardM

Anonymous said...

Gerard, you did an amazing thing creating Betawiki. It was a positive thing to build the perfect environment for people to go ahead and localize Mediawiki for their languages in a wiki created for that very purpose. Now anyone who wants to go ahead and contribute towards the localization of any message can go ahead and do so!

However, your attempts to raise barriers against languages for lack of localization, while well-meaning is ultimately negative and counterproductive. Let people localize at Betawiki when and how they choose. Encourage them to do so in positive ways.

But don't threaten them with inferior software (or no wiki at all) if they don't. If people choose to work on a wiki that is, at least for the meantime, not completely localized -- that is their choice. And if you want to support smaller languages, the way to do so is to let them build content however they are able and willing to do so, not to try to force them to do it your way.

Much content can be build in a wiki that is far from localized. And in fact, building such content, and building a community around that content, is ultimately what will push forward localization of the language.

Gerard, Betawiki is amazing. Stick to that wonderful achievement and stop threatening people.

GerardM said...

Scott, I am sure you mean well and I am equally sure English is your mother tongue. The point is that you do not have a clue what it means to have content that is in your language that you can not navigate because of an incomprehensible user interface.

Our wikis have a purpose and the purpose is to spread the knowledge that can be found in our Wikis. Localisation is one of the few tools that we have to enable our readers and editors.

As it is so vital, I share your sentiment but I disagree with you at the same time. The first objective is to enable our readers because only when they understand our purpose will they become editors.
Thanks,
GerardM

Anonymous said...

Gerard, I'm sorry about your sentiments on the personal level. The truth is that nearly my whole life has been devoted to languages, and I have more than a "clue" about the importance of localization (certainly no less than you do). Like you, I consider small languages to be an essential part of Wikimedia's goals, and like you I have worked towards this.

I want to *empower* editors in *all* languages. Betawiki *empowers* editors, and that is why it is so fantastic.

Preventing people from editing, however, or supplying them with inferior software, doesn't empower them. It is rather a form of not-so-nice paternalism on your part, where you tell them: "I know what you need far better than you do."

Once again, positive encouragement of localization is great. Negative threatening will prove counterproductive in the long run, and hamper localization more than helping it.

GerardM said...

Hoi,
If you feel that the latest stable version is inferior software, well fine, tell that to all the MediaWiki re-users.

Your notion about the "preventing of editing" is weird because the aim is exactly to improve the user experience and consequently to ease people into editing.

Insufficient localisation prevents editing. Your notion that just opening a wiki for a language works is sadly mistaken and there are plenty of failed Wkipedias that prove this point.
Thanks,
GerardM