User:Geitost/Participation on Meta
Participation on Meta in Other Languages than English
editThis world isn’t just an English one. Please always remember that it might not be very easy for non-English speakers or those who don’t speak English very well to participate on Meta, especially if they don’t speak a Germanic language well enough (even for many Germans it’s not so easy to communicate in English all the time, so that’s worse for languages which differ very much more, see below).
Much More Translation Needed
editThere’s a big need for multilingual projects like Meta and Commons to have many more translations, and there should be enough money to develop better tools to be able to participate here without or with only little knowledge of the English language (en-1 or en-0!). And for important events, professional translators should get involved to help out, if there isn’t any other way to do it.
It should be possible on Meta to discuss important issues also in other languages, and then the main things of these discussions should be translated (by professionals or with the help of better translation tools, because these full-time translation jobs just can’t be done by volunteers alone), so that real participation of people from other communities would become possible. If it comes to discussions about important things like new terms of use, there should be discussions in other languages on the talk pages of the translations about the issue itself, and not about the correct translation of the text. This leads to outsourcing of the discussions about the issues in the home wikis, but there should be a place here on Meta for these discussions. But there isn’t any, nearly everything is in English here. Most of the important pages have only few translations, others have none. Nearly every question and answer that has been posted for the now ongoing steward elections hasn’t been translated in any other language.
Knowledge of the English Language in the World
editPlease be aware of how the English knowledge on the maps below and on the right differs even between the Germanic-speaking countries in Europe on one side (Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium (partly), Switzerland, Austria, Germany and parts of Finland where Swedish is spoken as native language) and, on the other side, other Indo-Germanic language countries which you can find on the first map on top: with Romanic-speaking population in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania (and parts of Switzerland and Belgium) and also in Mexico; Greek-speaking population in Greece (with other script system); Baltic-speaking population in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; Slavic-speaking countries in East-Europe, f. ex. Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia and also in Russia (with different script system). Even Indic languages are Indo-Germanic, but have quite different script systems. In India, English is even a co-official language, but despite of this, only 0–20 % of the population speak the language quite well. That’s also the case for other countries with English as co-official language. So, it should be more difficult for people speaking mainly languages of other language families (like Hungarian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and others which are spoken in main parts of Asia and Africa by most of the population) to be able to contribute in English. There really should be done something.
| 80–100 % | 60–80 % | 40–60 % | 20–40 % | 0–20 % |
| official | co-official | de facto | effective use by majority |
(Please feel free to correct my typos.)