Wednesday, May 19, 2010

#translatewiki is not a WMF project ... duh

Every now and then projects like translatewiki.net find people who object to participating because "it is not a WMF project". In the case of translatewiki it should by now be obvious why they should; it provides an essential service to the development of MediaWiki.

Arguments like "but it does not have a privacy policy" or "how do we control its content" are coming from people who do not know or appreciate how translatewiki differs. Translatewiki means business and it does its thing without the many "carefully crafted" policies that confuse the heck out of almost everybody.

At translatewiki.net we internationalise and localise the software that is developed elsewhere. The software gets a quality check before the community starts localising and the localisations get a quality check before we commit it to the relevant source repository.

When our community does it work well, nothing changes except for the languages a message is available in. Translatewiki is part of the Wiki movement together with many project outside of the WMF that have their own niche and are worthwhile in their own right. Translatewiki is one, OmegaWiki, Wikia, Wikihow ..... the list goes on.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hm, translatewiki doesn't have a policy and licenses. That's why it can't be a WMF project. According to my understanding all hitherto existing translated strings mustn't be used any more because they are not correctly lisensed for WMF projects. Then all wiki projects are allowed to be used in English only. And where the WMF would get the translations from? What those people say is all nonsense. On the other hand, Translatewiki could then sell its translations to WMF. This could be expensive :-) -- Regards, michawiki

GerardM said...

First of all, assume good faith. Translatewiki.net is a FLOSS project. It provides a service on a daily basis to many open source projects. All this data is consequently licensed in the same way as those projects once committed.

The software used by translatewik.net is MediaWiki and is GPL licensed.

We provide a service to FLOSS projects, that is observable. When this is not the case, you are welcome to do a better job.
Thanks,
GerardM