Re: [gentoo-project] wiki: bad top-down localization approach

[Christian Ruppert]

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:37:57 +0400
Peter Volkov <pva@g.o> wrote:

> Hello. While it is not tool late, could you guys reconsider top-down
> localization approach decided on last meeting[1]?
>
> There are language specific things that will be be kept out of wiki
> only due to this policy. For example I don't see any reason to write
> article about use of Russian cryptography algorithms in Gentoo in any
> language but Russian. There is no need to have this article in
> English since nobody will read it.
>

Are you sure that no non-russian will read it?

> Another reason - reality is that most of people do not know English
> language. Why do you want to stop them from contributing? For quality
> control - we have translator teams or there are developers who know
> the language in question. Just find editors for every supported
> language and let them do quality control.
>
> [1] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Wiki:Meetings/2011-10-17 (see
> Log)
>
>
> WBR,
> --
> Peter.
>
>

IMHO it's simple.

I think it is ok to expect that "everybody" can read and/or write
English, at least partially. :)

As a3li already mentioned in the meeting log: English is the world
language, almost everything in the Open Source world is written in
English, documentation, comments and so on.

So I guess there are *much* more people who can read/write English but
*not* Russian, French or whatever else.

I find it quite unacceptable to write documentations, "source
code"/comments and so on in French, German, ... only. You'd need
somebody who knows both languages first to translate it into English so
that "everybody" can read it.
It is much easier if we say that we need at least the initial article in
English only/first because there are much more people who may or may
not take care of it and keep it up2date.

I also think that English articles are often more up2date because of
the reason(s) mentioned above, simple example: man-pages-$LANG.

I don't know about other languages but at least for English/German it
applies. *I* even try to avoid German docs because of that and often
they're also misleading or "completely" wrong, not enough people who
review it because they can't read it...

So you *basically* need English knowledge/basics to install and use 
Gentoo/Linux, not everything is translated and mostly not even fully.
Commands, Sources, ... almost all "English". You even need (basically)
English to learn C or other programming/script languages - Why would
you want to write docs, comments or even the help messages in your
native language then?

That just sucks if there is nothing in English and you need to read
those comments and so on. It's just shitty.

We also use English for our Mailinglists, IRC, Forums, Bugzilla and so
on, why? Because everybody can read it.

Another *bad* example are translated error messages.
Do you like to get bug reports with German error logs?

To me it's the same as with the Wiki, that is *my* opinion.

-- 
Regards,
Christian Ruppert
Role: Gentoo Linux developer, Bugzilla administrator and Infrastructure
member Fingerprint: EEB1 C341 7C84 B274 6C59 F243 5EAB 0C62 B427 ABC8